


Bad Moon Rising

by bedlamsbard



Series: Oxygen and Rust [1]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2013-10-17
Packaged: 2017-11-02 12:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedlamsbard/pseuds/bedlamsbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Returning to Coruscant from a mission, Obi-Wan Kenobi and her Padawan Anakin Skywalker are reunited with the newly-appointed Naboo Senator Padmé Amidala, who unwittingly draws them into the murky world of Republic politics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place about six years before [Dirt in the Machine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/345261) and three years before _Attack of the Clones_.

The first time that Obi-Wan Kenobi saw Padmé Amidala since she had left Theed with a new apprentice and the dubious honor of being the first Padawan in nearly a century to gain her Knighthood after the death of her Master and a trial in combat, she and Anakin had just returned from hunting down airship pirates on Derith Nahar. They had come straight from the transport hangar to the Council chamber, and afterwards all Obi-Wan wanted was the longest, hottest bath she could manage, preferably with her apprentice on the other side of a locked door from her. For all that Obi-Wan would cheerfully lay her life down for Anakin, sometimes she had to forcibly remind herself that smothering him in his sleep would probably be frowned upon by the Jedi Council. It had been raining on Coruscant when they arrived, so that they’d spent their debriefing slowly dripping puddles of water onto the floor of the Council chamber; Obi-Wan was uncomfortably aware that Anakin looked more like a drowned womprat than he did a Jedi apprentice, and was fairly certain that she didn’t look much better. Master Windu kept giving them pitying looks like he couldn’t remember why he had decided to knight her in the first place, even though her knighthood was some five years past.

They slunk out of the Council chamber as soon as they were dismissed, Obi-Wan trying discreetly to wring water out of her hair. They squelched their way back to her apartments, garnering pitying looks from passing Jedi and younglings and a flat-out guffaw from Quinlan Vos, who stopped mid-lecture to his Padawan to say, “Hey, Obi-Wan, there’s some politician looking for you.”

Obi-Wan managed to keep from saying out loud that the Supreme Chancellor could go hang, since Anakin actually liked the man for some reason, and instead inquired wearily, “Who? When?”

“Some woman, and just now. I sent her up to your rooms because I’d heard your transport had just come in, but if I’d known you looked like that, I would have told her to come back later,” he added, giving Obi-Wan’s soaked robes a significant look.

“Fancy being a bit more specific?”

“Sure,” he said, warming to his subject. “Young, pretty, brunette, fancy hair, said she knew you from –” He hesitated a beat, then went on, “– Naboo.”

“Padmé!” Anakin burst out, bouncing up on the balls of his feet.

“Yeah, that was what she said,” Quin said comfortably, while his Padawan gave Anakin an astonished look, as if she couldn’t believe that any Jedi would make that kind of outburst. “Padmé Amidala of Naboo.”

“What’s she doing on Coruscant?” Anakin demanded. “Is something wrong on Naboo?”

“He does know that she was asking for Master Kenobi, not him, right?” Aayla Secura muttered to her Master.

“Queen Jamillia appointed Padmé to the Galactic Senate last month,” Obi-Wan explained, wringing out her long sleeves on Quin’s boots. “The pirate captain was attempting to secure my hand in marriage at the time, so I didn’t think it necessary to inform you.”

“You’ve got to tell me this story sometime, Obi-Wan,” Quin said happily.

“Only if you’re buying the drinks,” Obi-Wan said with feeling. “Come on, Anakin. Thanks for letting me know about the senator, Quin.”

“Hey, feel free to send me any other pretty women you know my way, Obi-Wan,” Quin grinned.

The prospect of seeing Padmé Amidala again brought Anakin out of his doldrums, and he spent the rest of the walk back to her apartments chattering nervously and excitedly about Padmé.

“I haven’t seen her since I was just a kid,” he confided anxiously as Obi-Wan depressed the control for the door. “What if –” He went silent and scarlet as the door slid open.

Padmé Amidala had been sitting in a chair by the window, but she stood up at the sound of the door, turning with a smile. “Obi-Wan!” she said. “I’m so glad I didn’t miss you. Chancellor Palpatine told me that you were scheduled to arrive back on Coruscant today, I hope that this isn’t too much of an imposition.”

“Not at all, Senator,” Obi-Wan said, bowing and then submitting to being kissed on each cheek. “It’s wonderful to see you again. You remember my Padawan, Anakin Skywalker, of course –”

“Little Ani?” Padmé said, smiling as Anakin made a hasty bow. “You’ve grown!”

Anakin blurted out something so painfully awkward that Obi-Wan felt embarrassed on his behalf. She discarded her soaked cloak with a sigh of relief, hanging it on a hook where it continued to drip on the tile.

“Anakin and I have been on assignment on Derith Nahar,” she explained, when Anakin ran out of terrible flattery and fell silent. “Get out of your wet things before you catch a chill, my young Padawan,” she added.

“Master Kenobi, I’m sure that you’re tired after such a long mission, but I was hoping you’d come to dinner with me,” Padmé said, with a faint hint of color in her cheeks.

“We’d love to,” Anakin said immediately, almost dropping his cloak. “Wouldn’t we, Master?”

“You’re welcome to join us, Ani, but –”

“You have your post-mission report to do,” Obi-Wan intervened swiftly. “And you have to make sure you’re caught up before you go back to classes tomorrow. Now that she’s a senator, Padmé will be on Coruscant quite often, I’m sure. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up later. Although,” she added, “you might have to give up one of your lunches with the Supreme Chancellor to do so.”

Anakin’s gaze dropped. “Yes, Master.”

“Do you mind waiting five minutes, Senator?” Obi-Wan asked. “Anakin and I went straight from our transport to the Council, and I have six weeks of mud and engine oil in my robes. I’m not really appropriate for polite company.”

“Oh, of course,” Padmé said. “I’m sure Ani and I can start some of that catching up.”

“I won’t take long,” Obi-Wan said, ducking into her bedroom. She took the fastest shower of her life, toweling her hair dry before pulling on a new set of blissfully-clean robes. She braided her damp hair quickly and pinned it up, then sat down on the edge of her bed to pull on a different pair of boots and switch her lightsaber from her old belt to the clean one. When she emerged, snatching up a dry cloak, Anakin was flirting clumsily with Padmé, who was clearly under no illusions regarding his intentions.

“That was quick,” she said, looking slightly relieved as Obi-Wan shrugged into her cloak. Obi-Wan could sympathize; Anakin’s flirtations were generally well meant but poorly executed. 

“Jedi are trained to be ready to go at a moment’s notice,” Obi-Wan said. “Ready, Senator?”

Padmé retrieved her coat from the hook she’d hung it on while Anakin looked desolately after them. “Have a nice evening, Master, Padmé,” he compromised finally, even though Obi-Wan could sense a faint hint of resentment from him. “Don’t stay out too late.”

“My apprentice, not my mother,” Obi-Wan reminded him as Padmé preceded her out into the corridor. “Try and get some rest, Anakin.”

“He’s not at all what I expected,” Padmé observed after the door had shut behind Obi-Wan.

“Well, he’s a Jedi,” Obi-Wan said, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her robes. “We specialize in thwarting expectations – what did you expect, anyway?”

“From your stories?” Her mouth twitched a little, amused.

“Point taken, Senator,” Obi-Wan said; she and Padmé had kept up a correspondence after she and Anakin had left Naboo, and Padmé had been privy to more than one rant about Anakin in the years since, though Obi-Wan had thought she’d kept it fairly low key. “He’s not that bad.”

Padmé bestowed a smile on a passing Quinlan Vos, who had apparently made another circle of the wing to see the outcome of their meeting. Aayla gave Obi-Wan a long-suffering look; Obi-Wan would have taken it more seriously if she hadn’t know that she and Quin were as well-suited to each other as two halves of a whole. “He’s still the same sweet Ani.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you had to live with him,” Obi-Wan said, then passed a hand over her face. “I shouldn’t say that; I don’t mean it. Anakin’s a better Padawan than I am a Master. But I’m sure you don’t want to talk about Anakin. How long have you been on Coruscant?”

“Just a few weeks now, when the new Senate session began. Senator Organa of Alderaan and Senator Mothma of Chandrila have taken me under their wing; it’s quite an experience –”

They talked idly on their way down to the visitor landing platform, where Padmé’s driver was waiting in a covered speeder. She and Obi-Wan slid into the back seat, Padmé giving instructions to her driver.

“I feel honor-bound to tell you that there’s a very real possibility that I may fall asleep,” Obi-Wan told her apologetically. “Our transport wasn’t very congenial so far as getting a good night’s rest goes, and before that, well – it’s a long story.”

“Don’t worry,” Padmé said, and smiled. “If you pass out, you can stay with me tonight and go back to the Jedi Temple in the morning.”

“Anakin would have a fit,” Obi-Wan sighed.

*

Anakin did, indeed, have a fit.

Obi-Wan made it through most of dinner, but the dessert course proved to be too much for her, and she nodded nearly nodded off into the rosewater custard, when Padmé roused her up and helped her into a bedroom. Obi-Wan managed to get her boots and her belt off before falling asleep.

She woke up to bright sunlight streaming across the bed and the frantic buzzing of her comlink. Obi-Wan called it into her hand and said, “This is Kenobi,” trying to remember where she was.

“Master, where are you?” Anakin demanded, sounding on the edge of hysteria. “Are you all right? Are you hurt? Do you need me to come rescue you?”

“Please don’t,” Obi-Wan said, rolling over onto her back. “I’m at Senator Amidala’s apartment.”

“You’re _what_?”

“Go to class, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, and shut the comlink off on his outraged squawk. It immediately beeped at her again, because Anakin had never learned to leave well enough alone; Obi-Wan thumbed it on again and added, “ _Meditate_ , Anakin, and then go to class; you must be projecting strongly enough to send half the Temple into hysterics,” before shutting it off.

She sat up and looked around. It was a bedroom very much of the sort she’d used in Theed six years ago; the architecture was Coruscanti, but the décor was Naboo, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows against one wall that revealed the cityscape below. Obi-Wan had fallen asleep on top of the covers; someone had folded her cloak neatly on the trunk at the foot of the bed, with her utility belt on top of it and her lightsaber within reach. She leaned down to pull her boots on, smoothing the worst of the wrinkles out of her robes as she buckled on her belt. Outside the room she could hear voices; she followed them out into the hallway and onto the verandah, where she found Padmé having breakfast with a stranger that Obi-Wan remembered vaguely from the HoloNews column on the new season’s senators.

Both of them looked up at her approach, and Padmé smiled. “Sleep well, Obi-Wan?”

“Very much, thank you,” Obi-Wan said. “I don’t believe I’m familiar with your friend?”

He rose to take her hand. “I’m Rush Clovis, the Senator from Scipio. And you are –”

“Obi-Wan Kenobi. A pleasure to meet you, Senator.”

“A Jedi Knight,” he said, glancing at the lightsaber on her belt and sounding impressed. “I wasn’t aware you were so familiar with the Jedi, Senator Amidala.”

“Obi-Wan and I are old friends,” Padmé explained. “She was one of the Jedi Knights assigned to help end the Trade Federation’s occupation of Naboo when I was queen.” She indicated a chair at the table, and Obi-Wan slid into the seat. A droid immediately came up to pour her a cup of mandelberry juice.

“Oh, yes, I heard about that. Terrible affair,” Clovis drawled. “I remember hearing that a Jedi Knight was killed there; is that true?”

“My former Master, Qui-Gon Jinn,” Obi-Wan said, with the faint, familiar pang that always accompanied the memory. She ran a finger down the condensation on the side of her cup. “His death was a great blow to the Order, but it was the will of the Force.”

Clovis seemed unaffected by her personal tragedy, but he perked up a little at the mention of the Force. “You know, Master Kenobi, I believe you’re the first Jedi I’ve ever met. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to show me any of your –” He wriggled his fingers. “– Jedi tricks.”

Obi-Wan frowned. “They’re not tricks.”

“But do they exist?”

Padmé and Obi-Wan glanced at each other. “Master Kenobi just woke up,” Padmé began.

Qui-Gon had always told her that her pride was one of her weaknesses; Obi-Wan was sure that it was, but it meant that she and Anakin had something in common. She wasn’t about to let anyone malign the Jedi Order. She put her cup down and tipped the first two fingers of her right hand up, raising the fruit bowl at the center of the table a foot into the air. She lifted her left hand, sending each piece of fruit up, spinning clockwise in the air above the bowl. She blinked once, the pattern set in her mind, and sent the fruit spiraling upwards, floating a piece to each of their plates before letting the rest of it settle back into the bowl, lowering it back to the table with a faint thump.

Clovis applauded. “Nice trick.”

Padmé, who had seen Jedi using the Force in combat, rolled her eyes slightly.

“Thanks,” Obi-Wan said dryly, slicing the fruit up into bite-sized pieces.

“Doesn’t seem very practical, though.”

Six years ago Obi-Wan might have told him that the Force could pull starships out of space if the Jedi was strong enough, but today she forbore from saying as much and just shrugged. She had the feeling that Clovis probably wouldn’t believe her anyway.

She stayed through breakfast, then Padmé walked her down to the speeder platform. “I’m sorry about Senator Clovis,” she apologized. “He just dropped by this morning and it would have been rude to send him away – I hope you didn’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Obi-Wan said. “I ought to be the one apologizing for putting you out by staying the night –”

“Don’t bother, what else are friends for?”

Obi-Wan’s comlink buzzed again. She took it off her belt and frowned at it. “Anakin’s been comming me all morning,” she said. “And probably most of last night too. Blast the boy, I told him I was fine and to go to class.”

Padmé smiled. “It’s good to know that you two are so fond of each other.”

“Anakin forgets that he isn’t my maiden aunt,” Obi-Wan said, rolling her eyes. “Although maybe he thinks he’s yours, who knows? But yes. We have proven to be very well-suited to each other.” She slid into the back of a speeder as one of the Naboo drivers held the door open for her.

“Would you be averse to doing this again sometime?” Padmé said hopefully. “I’m sure you must be very busy; I am too, but –”

“Without such an abrupt end to the evening, I hope,” Obi-Wan agreed. “I have to be ready to leave Coruscant at a moment’s notice, but Anakin and I are due some downtime, if only because he still has Temple classes. I’d love to.”

“Wonderful,” Padmé said, leaning down to press a delicate kiss to Obi-Wan’s cheek. “And Ani and I can have lunch sometime, too. That ought to please him.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Obi-Wan said with feeling. “Sometime in the next five years I may even stop hearing about it.”

Padmé laughed and closed the speeder door, and Obi-Wan settled back, pulling her hood up over her face as they departed 500 Republica. A good dinner and a full night’s rest had done a lot to restore her after the grueling six weeks she’d just had – the pirates had been the least of it – and even aside from Clovis’s polite disdain for the Jedi, Obi-Wan felt more or less at peace with the universe. This feeling lasted approximately until she reached the speeder platform at the Temple and found Anakin waiting for her, his arms crossed over his chest. He came up to meet her, trying to emit dignity but mostly succeeding in sending out waves of dismay to everyone on the landing platform. Obi-Wan sighed and prepared herself for well-meaning lectures about keeping her Padawan’s emotions in check from every other Master in the Order.

“I thought I told you to go to class,” she said after the speeder had left.

“I did!” Anakin protested. “And then Master Diath told me to leave because my rogue emotions were disrupting everyone else’s studies.”

They began walking back towards the entrance to the Temple, automatically falling in step. “Did he actually say ‘rogue emotions’?” Obi-Wan inquired curiously. If he had, it would certainly have been justified; Anakin was projecting distress to anyone Force-sensitive within twenty feet. At least his shields were good enough that he hadn’t shared his hysterics with the entire Temple.

He nodded. “He also said to tell you that I need to work on my control.”

“You don’t say,” Obi-Wan said, touching a finger to the back of his wrist and using the physical contact to strengthen his shields, even though she could already sense his distress evening out into curiosity and faint irritation. “Did you actually get any rest last night?”

“Until I woke up and you still weren’t back.” He gave her a suspicious look. “What were you and Padmé doing last night, anyway?”

“An orgy with Twi’lek strippers, deathsticks for all comers, and the Corellian ale flowing, of course,” Obi-Wan told him. “It ran on a little long.”

Anakin’s mouth worked silently.

“Or we had dinner and I fell asleep during dessert because we haven’t had a chance to rest in more than a month, Padawan, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well, I know you don’t like deathsticks,” Anakin said eventually. “Or strippers. Though you are a little fond of Corellian ale. Not that Padmé would do something like that, obviously.”

“Your faith in me is touching. And I like strippers just fine, thank you.”

Obi-Wan could see Anakin process this statement, his eyes glazing over for a second at the implications, then discard it. “We just spent three days chained to a ceiling!” he protested. “I think a little paranoia is justified.”

“All right, I’ll give you that,” Obi-Wan said after a moment’s consideration. “What would you have done if I had said, ‘Yes, I’ve been kidnapped, I need you to come and rescue me?’”

Anakin opened his mouth to retort, then realized that she’d been serious and went silent for a moment, thinking. “Well, I would have come and gotten you, obviously. I would have traced the signal on your comlink to find out where you were, then I’d get your spare lightsaber and go after you in a speeder. And tell someone at the Temple, I guess.”

“What if I’d been taken off-planet?”

He hesitated. “I’d still be able to trace your signal, but I’d have to requisition a starship. And tell the Council.”

“That’s good,” Obi-Wan said. “But what are you forgetting?”

“Finding out who’s responsible?” he hazarded. “Oh, um, if you were with Padmé I’d want to check with her or her guards, to see if she was safe or if you’d been taken on your way back to the Temple or something. Because it’s more likely that someone would be after a Senator than a Jedi, and she might have been the target, not you.”

“Very good. Now let’s hope you never have to put that to the test,” Obi-Wan said. “Besides Master Diath’s, do you have any other classes today?”

Anakin shook his head. “Master Saa was called away on assignment and they haven’t found a substitute yet.”

Obi-Wan nodded. “I’m sorry for worrying you,” she compromised finally. “I should have commed you to let you know I was staying the night at Senator Amidala’s.”

Anakin gave her a look that said clearly that she really, really should have and didn’t say anything in response.

As a better apology, Obi-Wan added, “Let’s go run the obstacle course.”

That cheered Anakin up immediately.

*

“Running the obstacle course alone in the middle of the night?” Quinlan Vos inquired. “In the dark? Without your lightsaber? Now that has to be the sign of a disturbed mind.”

Obi-Wan swung herself up, landing in a crouch on the slender width of the pole, and dove sideways to avoid a barrage of laser bolts, catching herself with one hand and turning her fall into a smooth leap to the next beam. “On a mission we don’t always have the luxury of having all the advantages.”

She tossed herself into a backflip, laser bolts – set to sting rather than to stun or kill – passing beneath the smooth arc of her back, and landed in a handstand on a beam a few feet higher up, glancing down at the shadowed figure of her friend before moving again as the wall-mounted blasters adjusted their aim.

“It’s a good way to get yourself injured.”

“Good thing you’re here to catch me, then.” Obi-Wan flung herself sideways, bouncing off the wall and tucking herself into a roll that carried her upwards, landing flat-footed on a rounded beam that almost sent her tumbling to the floor, though she pulled herself up at the last minute, a stray laser bolt clipping her left elbow.

Quin crossed his arms over his chest, peering up at her. “Padawan problems?” he guessed. “Bad dreams again?”

“Neither.”

“Your precog peaking again?”

“If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times,” Obi-Wan snapped, irritated. “My ability to sense the future is not as strong as you and the Council think. I’m no different than any other Jedi when it comes to – blast!”

She had misjudged her leap, her fingers slipping from the beam as her numbed left arm failed her, and was now falling through mid-air. Quinlan thrust his hand out, the Force curving around Obi-Wan and softening her fall as she landed in a crouch on the mats.

“End simulation,” she said, straightening up.

The wall-mounted blasters stilled as the lights in the high-vaulted room came back on. Obi-Wan rubbed her left elbow, still numb where she’d been clipped by the sting blast. “Thanks,” she said, as Quin came over to her.

“Any time,” he said. “So – if it’s not your Padawan, and it’s not your nightmares, and it’s not the Force, then what’s eating at you this late? That pretty senator of yours?”

“I wish.” Obi-Wan twisted her braid around her wrist, frowning. “Dooku of Serenno is on Coruscant.”

“The same Dooku who left the Order six years ago?” Quin questioned.

Obi-Wan nodded. “Qui-Gon’s old Master. He tried to contact me once before, just after Qui-Gon died, but I was – unavailable. The next thing I knew, he’d left the Order and publicly denounced the Jedi. And then this evening he sent me this holo message.” She pulled the holodisc out of her pocket and depressed the play button.

_“Master Kenobi, I believe that we have much to discuss,_ ” Count Dooku’s recording said. _“If you are amenable to a meeting, I will be on Coruscant for the next few weeks. I would very much like to speak with you.”_

She slipped it back into her pocket. “It’s nonsense, of course. I have no use for a man who abandons his responsibilities to the Jedi Order, much less one who has the temerity to then denounce the Order to the Senate.”

Quin frowned. “What does he want with you?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said. “And I can’t say that I really care.”

“But it’s upset you.”

She glanced aside. “I have a bad feeling. But it’s nothing, I’m sure.”

Quinlan touched her arm. “Listen, let me put out some feelers for you. I can at least find out why he’s here on Coruscant. And if you let me take this to Tholme – well, he keeps a pretty close eye on Dooku, since the guy used to be a Jedi Master.” He put his hand out.

Obi-Wan hesitated for a moment, then put the disc into his palm. He closed his fingers around it, then put it into his pocket. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he reassured her.

“Probably,” Obi-Wan agreed, and didn’t know how to tell him that every time she watched that message the hair rose on the back of her neck and the Force twisted around her, uncertain and confused, warning her about a danger that made no sense. “Look, I trust you, and I trust Tholme, but could you do me a favor and not tell anyone else about this? I’m in enough hot water with the Council over the Derith Nahar affair, I’d rather keep it quiet than have them think I can’t handle myself.”

“Sure, Obi-Wan,” he said. “I thought the Derith Nahar mission went well?”

“There was a – thing,” Obi-Wan said, and dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “Anakin and I had it under control; I just don’t know if the Council sees it that way. And there was the other day where he couldn’t get hold of me and panicked – you know there are still some members of the Council that think that Anakin should never have become a Jedi, and others that believe that even if he did, I shouldn’t have been the one to train him. It’s just – the way Qui-Gon died, my Knighthood, this ridiculous story about Anakin being the Chosen One…” She let the words trail off. “You’re a good friend, Quin.”

He took her hands. “You’re a good Jedi, Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon trained you well, and the Council knows you’re doing the best that you can with Anakin, the same way I am with Aayla.”

She conjured up the ghost of a smile. “I know I’m a good Jedi, Quin. I don’t need you to tell me that, even though I appreciate it. Anakin is difficult, but…we are very well-suited to each other. Not the way that Qui-Gon and I were, or the way that Tholme and you were –”

“Both lying bastards, you mean?”

She grinned back. “And here I was going to be polite.” She twisted her braid between her fingers. “Sometimes I think that maybe the Council should have assigned Anakin another Master, but – I promised Qui-Gon I’d train him. And it feels…right. Like the two of us together is what the Force wants. I didn’t choose him as my Padawan, Quin. Not the way a normal Jedi does. If Qui-Gon was still alive he’d know what that means.”

“But if Qui-Gon had lived, you would never have been Anakin’s Master,” Quinlan pointed out, maddeningly reasonable.

“Yes, and if he’d lived, then Dooku would never have left the Order and I wouldn’t be getting messages from him,” Obi-Wan sighed. “Master Yoda would say that it’s all the will of the Force. I know it is, and sometimes it even seems right, but – I don’t know, Quin. Maybe the real truth about being a Jedi is knowing that nothing’s ever really right.”

“That’s not the truth about being a Jedi, Obi-Wan,” Quinlan said. “That’s the truth about growing up.”

Obi-Wan smiled and ducked her head. “That’s true too. Well, I know why I’m up at an unseemly hour of the night, I won’t bother asking why you are, since I probably don’t want to know. But since you’re here ¬–” She tipped her head back at the course. “Think you can keep up with me?”

“Are we still doing this the hard way? In the dark? No lightsabers? Flying laser bolts? Obi-Wan,” he said, unclipping his lightsaber from his belt and putting it down beside hers, “it’s like you don’t even know me.”

“Computer, set simulation Theta Alderaan Two-Two-Three variation Shen,” Obi-Wan said, rolling her shoulders.

“Simulation set,” the computer replied harmonically, the lights dimming.

Quinlan grinned at Obi-Wan, settling into a crouch. “Begin simulation.”

Dawn was just beginning to appear over the horizon when they finished, and Obi-Wan was laughing and nursing several scrapes and forming bruises where she’d misjudged her swings or fallen before catching herself with the Force. By the time they’d finished the fifth run of the course several other Jedi were beginning to filter into the room, settling down at the side of the room to watch her and Quinlan go at it. They garnered a round of applause as they made it back to the floor, Obi-Wan deflecting a laser bolt with her bare hand and a twist of the Force before Quin ended the simulation.

Obi-Wan grinned at them, accepting a towel and a glass of water from Kit Fisto as Aayla Secura did the same for her Master. Quin stepped towards her, squeezing her elbow, and muttered in her ear, “I’ll talk to Tholme about Dooku.”

“Thanks,” Obi-Wan said, equally soft, as she picked up their lightsabers and handed Quin’s to him. She toweled her face dry and tossed the towel back at Kit.

The Temple was still quiet as she made her way back through mostly empty hallways to her apartments. Anakin was still asleep when she ducked her head into his bedroom, sprawled gracelessly across his entire bed with a datapad discarded on the floor beside him. Obi-Wan didn’t mean to pry into his mind, but the Master-Padawan bond was open between them and she got a quick flash of Padmé Amidala’s pale face in his dreams before she drew up her own shields, motioning the door closed.

She settled down in an armchair in their tiny living room, flicking a finger at the holocomm to turn it on. She’d given the disc to Quin, but the message was saved on the holocomm too.

_“Master Kenobi, I believe that we have much to discuss,”_ said the man who had left the Jedi Order without so much as a word of explanation. _“If you are amenable to a meeting, I will be on Coruscant for the next few weeks. I would very much like to speak with you.”_


	2. Chapter 2

The decision was taken out of her hands a few days later. Obi-Wan had gone to the Senate Building to collect Anakin from the Chancellor’s office, where she was forced to endure fifteen minutes of well-meaning questions about Anakin’s education at the Jedi Temple and why it was that they weren’t being given more high-risk assignments before Palpatine suddenly and mysteriously recalled an urgent appointment elsewhere and shuttled them back out into the hallway. By then Obi-Wan had the beginnings of the utterly inexplicable headache that seemed to crop up whenever she was in the Supreme Chancellor’s presence for more than a few minutes; she let Anakin chatter on as they made their way through the building’s twisting halls to the corridor they’d arranged to meet Padmé in when she finished with her committee meeting. They were in the lift when Anakin paused mid-sentence to look at her, his brow wrinkling in concern.

“Master, are you all right?”

Obi-Wan massaged her brow. Away from the Chancellor and his unwelcome intrusion into Anakin’s life, the headache was starting to fade – the same way it always did, although its appearance was a regular companion of her visits with Palpatine, which was why she’d been glad when Anakin had become old enough that he was capable of going to the Senate Building without her accompaniment. Jedi Knight or not, one couldn’t exactly tell the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic to stay away from their Padawan, and the one time she’d tried to bring up the inappropriateness of the relationship to Anakin, they’d gotten into a screaming fight that had culminated in Anakin storming out of the Temple and Obi-Wan having to haul him out of an illegal drag race in one of Coruscant’s less desirable sectors when she finally tracked him down six hours later. It had not been one of her more shining moments, and both she and Anakin had been so embarrassed by it that the subject had never come up since.

“I’m fine,” she told Anakin, tucking her hands into her sleeves. “What did you and the Supreme Chancellor talk about that?”

“Derith Nahar,” Anakin said promptly, and at Obi-Wan’s wince, added quickly, “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him about the thing. I didn’t think you’d appreciate that.”

“No,” Obi-Wan said with relief. “Thank you.” Because the last thing she needed was the Supreme Chancellor to hear about getting strung up and proposed to by a group of particularly irate pirates.

Anakin grinned comfortably at her. “Have you told Padmé about that?”

“My young Padawan, we’re lucky I told the Council about it. Why in the galaxy would I tell Senator Amidala?”

“Because it’s funny.”

“Not at the time,” Obi-Wan said firmly. “And not for some time.”

They emerged from the elevator onto a red-carpeted hallway that looked exactly the same as the last one they’d been in, except that the statues in the nooks lining it were different. Obi-Wan and Anakin proceeded down it, past senatorial aides and protocol droids, and came to a stop in front of a pair of closed double doors. Anakin immediately leaned against the wall opposite, watching the doors like a hawk sighting prey.

“Did she say anything about me?” he asked Obi-Wan anxiously.

“Anakin, I know that this will come as a shock to you, but not every conversation I have is actually about you.”

He shrugged this off. “But did she?”

Obi-Wan dropped her head into her hands and groaned loudly.

“What?” Anakin said. “What did I say?”

“She was also, not that it should be any concern of yours, my very young Padawan, with a man,” Obi-Wan said.

“Who?” he demanded immediately. “Do we know him? Is he another Jedi? Is he another Senator?”

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan reminded him, “your life is sworn to the Jedi Order. You aren’t permitted to have romantic rivals.”

He shrugged. Obi-Wan wondered, not for the first time, what in the universe the Jedi Council had been drinking when they’d decided to give her a Padawan and why they hadn’t been kind enough to share.

Horrifying as this line of conversation was, Obi-Wan would still have preferred to continue it rather than what came next. She turned her head to respond to Anakin and then stopped, all the hair rising on the back of her neck and on her arms beneath her robes as the Force…shivered. There was no better word for it. It was as if she was a spider and the Force was her web and something, _someone_ had trod on it, disturbing the delicate balance that Obi-Wan was accustomed to.

Anakin felt it too. His lips parted a little in confusion as he reached for his lightsaber, automatic reaction to something that he could tell distressed them both. Obi-Wan resisted the urge to do the same, pushing Anakin’s hand away from his weapon instead. She’d felt this before – couldn’t say when, couldn’t say where, but it was so terrifyingly familiar that it was as if she’d been plunged back into her old nightmares. But she couldn’t say what it was.

For a moment it threatened to overwhelm her, and then it was gone as quickly as it had come. Obi-Wan’s hand was still on Anakin’s arm, and she could feel the tension in him as he stared wild-eyed around the hall, the muscle flexing beneath her palm.

“Master?” he demanded. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan admitted, reaching out with the Force to find it again. But it was gone now, locked away behind someone else’s mental shields, and try as she could, she couldn’t sense it. She opened her eyes to find Anakin staring at her, his fingers still twitching towards his lightsaber.

“Ah, Master Kenobi!”

Obi-Wan let her hand drop from Anakin’s arm, turning slowly to look at the group approaching from around a corner. “Oh, no,” she muttered.

“Master?” Anakin questioned.

Count Dooku of Serenno was at the head of the group, followed by the Trade Federation’s representative and the Geonosian Senator, along with their aides and a small flock of droids. Lott Dod, recognizing Obi-Wan, glared; the Geonosian Senator blinked at them without interest. Dooku stepped away from them, smiling at Obi-Wan like a benevolent grandfather.

“Master Kenobi,” he repeated. “What a wonderful coincidence; I’ve been hoping that we would have a chance to meet while I was on Coruscant.”

Obi-Wan drew herself up, letting the Force settle around her like a second cloak and knowing that Dooku, who had been a Jedi Master up until six years ago, would sense it as well. “Count Dooku,” she said coldly. “I’m afraid I have nothing to say to you.”

The Count looked more amused than anything else. “We have someone in common, Master Kenobi,” he said. “Your former master Qui-Gon Jinn was once my Padawan, as you were his –”

“And you dishonored his memory when you blamed the Order for his death,” Obi-Wan said. She tucked her hands into her sleeves, the part of her that was always aware of Anakin noting quietly that he was doing the same, perfectly mirroring her pose from his position just behind her right shoulder.

He raised an eyebrow. “Holding grudges, Master Kenobi? That doesn’t suit a Jedi Knight.”

It didn’t. Obi-Wan had tried to make herself not care, to accept what Dooku had done and move on from it, but it was the implied insult to Qui-Gon that stung her, not the insult to the Order. She’d heard far worse things said about the Order in the years that she’d been a Jedi. She was damned if she would say as much, though.

“It grieves me that you would make allegations about Qui-Gon’s death without even waiting to hear the facts,” she said eventually. “I was, after all, there. There was nothing that the Order could have done.”

“And the fact that you survived and avenged your Master should release them from any responsibility?”

“What I did was not vengeance!” Obi-Wan said, wincing at the harshness in her voice. She gripped her forearms inside her sleeves, trying to calm herself. Anakin, sensing her dismay, gave her a worried look.

“Master Kenobi said that she didn’t want to talk to you,” he spoke up. “I think you should leave now, Count Dooku.”

Dooku turned an amused gaze on him. “You must be the infamous Anakin Skywalker,” he said. “Qui-Gon spoke of you to me once, just before he died. He was quite fascinated by you.”

“I get that a lot,” Anakin snapped.

“You must have been considerably more precocious as a child, as I fail to see the attraction,” Dooku observed.

Obi-Wan felt the flare of Anakin’s anger in the Force and stepped in before he said something that he’d regret. “Is there something you want to say to me, Count?”

“Yes, actually,” the Count said, the heady force of his gaze swinging back to her. Obi-Wan could feel the strength behind his eyes, held in check by a lifetime’s Jedi training. “But here is neither the time nor the place. Would you be averse to meeting at a later date? Say, perhaps, lunch?”

“I would, actually,” Obi-Wan said. “I don’t believe we have anything to discuss.”

“I would disagree with that statement,” Dooku observed. “I believe we have mutual interests, Master Kenobi. Shall we meet to discuss them? I will,” he added, with something like a smirk lingering around his lips, “give you time to inform the Jedi Council of this, so you can go running to them if you desire.”

Obi-Wan pressed her lips together tightly and didn’t say anything.

Dooku smiled. “I’ll be in touch, Master Kenobi,” he said as the doors to the committee room opened. “Oh – and tell Master Tholme that if he wishes to speak to me, he can do so himself rather than having his creatures lurk in the street outside my apartments.”

Behind him, Obi-Wan heard Lott Dod say, “Ah, Senator Clovis – and Senator Amidala, what an unexpected…pleasure.”

“Senator Dod,” Padmé said politely. “How nice to see you again.”

Dooku stepped back from Obi-Wan. “Another time, Master Kenobi,” he said, turning away. “Senator Clovis, how good of you to join us.”

They swept off down the hall, Dooku’s entourage following in his wake as the rest of Padmé’s committee dissipated in various directions. Padmé crossed to Obi-Wan and Anakin, giving Dooku a curious glance as he left.

“What was that about?”

“Nothing good,” Obi-Wan said.

“Hi, Padmé,” Anakin said, any interest he’d had in Dooku utterly redirected by Padmé’s arrival.

She smiled at him. “Hello, Ani. How have you been?”

They began to walk back towards the lift, Obi-Wan and Anakin naturally falling into position on either side of Padmé. Anakin might have been distracted, but Obi-Wan was mentally reeling; she wanted nothing more than to find a quiet corner and comm the Council, or at least Master Tholme, the Jedi spymaster. It might have been nothing – probably was nothing, Dooku had been Qui-Gon’s Master and Qui-Gon had been Obi-Wan’s. For most Jedi that was the closest they ever got to anything like a family. Dooku might have considered Obi-Wan all that was left of Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan might have said that she had a bad feeling about it, but in fact she had nothing of the sort, just a creeping sense of unease at the oddity of the meeting. Whatever he was now, Dooku of Serenno had once been a Jedi Master; even for a Jedi Knight whose ability with the Force was as strong as Obi-Wan’s was, it was impossible to get any sense of what his intentions were when his shields were up.

Her distress was palpable enough that Anakin stopped, mid-sentence once again, and gave her a worried look. “Master, what is it?”

“It’s nothing,” Obi-Wan said, aware of Padmé’s curious gaze on them. She dragged her mind away from Dooku with a ferocious wrench and put up her mental shields more securely. Anakin wasn’t particularly sensitive to other people’s emotions except when they happened to be Obi-Wan’s, and then he had the frankly somewhat alarming tendency to get her feelings mixed up with his. They’d been working on controlling it for years, ever since Obi-Wan had figured out what was actually happening. His ability wasn’t unique, but it wasn’t common in a Padawan as old as he was.

“Who was that you were speaking to?” Padmé questioned.

“Count Dooku of Serenno,” Obi-Wan said, keeping her voice as even as she could. “He used to be a Jedi Master until he left the Order six years ago a few weeks after Qui-Gon was killed. He was later publicly critical of both the Senate and the Order, whom he blamed for the situation on Naboo –” She saw Anakin glance at Padmé, then quickly away, his cheeks coloring, “– and the circumstances of Qui-Gon’s death. Qui-Gon used to be his Padawan, you see.”

“Oh,” Padmé said. “Yes, I remember hearing about that, though at the time I had other concerns.”

“It was hugely controversial. I wasn’t paying much attention at the time either.” She had been lost in her own grief, too busy trying to figure out how to teach a Padawan instead of be one to pay any attention to a scandal that had, she’d learned only later, had a great deal to do with her.

Anakin glanced down at the floor. “What does he want with us?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”

*

The carpet on the stairs muffled Obi-Wan’s bootsteps. She climbed slowly, passing several other Jedi on her way but not speaking to any of them, keeping the hood of her cloak up to hide her face, though it wasn’t as if her identity was a secret to any of them. She felt tired more than anything else, tired without any real explanation for why, as though Dooku’s reappearance had triggered all the old sorrows that she had thought she’d long since buried. It all seemed to be coming back at once, Padmé and Dooku both conjuring up the memory of Qui-Gon. It’s not like Obi-Wan had even known Dooku when he’d been a Jedi; she’d seen him once or twice with Qui-Gon, but he’d never taken any interest in her then and they’d never spoken. She hadn’t even been certain that he’d known her name, known anything about her except that she’d been Qui-Gon’s padawan. She couldn’t imagine what he wanted with her now.

She took the fifth landing, passing by a floor-length clear window bordered by two stained glass ones, and turned down the hallway to the left. She went all the way down to the end of the corridor and tapped her fingers on the right-hand door.

“It’s Obi-Wan Kenobi,” she said, the introduction unnecessary for a Jedi, and ducked inside as the door slid open, pulling her hood back from her face.

She had expected to find only Tholme and Quin here, maybe Aayla if they’d decided that the Dooku affair was appropriate for Quin’s Padawan to be aware of. No Aayla, she saw as she walked in, but instead Yoda and Mace Windu as well as Tholme and Quinlan.

Obi-Wan bowed. “Masters.”

Tholme tipped his head at an empty seat. Obi-Wan folded herself into it, looking back and forth between Yoda, Windu, and Tholme; Quinlan was leaning against the window frame, his arms crossed over his chest. He gave her an apologetic look; the only reason Obi-Wan didn’t shrug in reply was because her superiors were watching.

“Masters, I take it that your presence here is a sign that this is a matter about which I should be concerned,” she said.

“Perhaps,” Windu said. “It could be nothing more than what it seems, though Dooku’s never had a taste for sentimentality.”

“Hard to read, Dooku is,” Yoda said. “Skilled in the use of the Force, he is.”

“Masters, I take it you aren’t aware that I met Count Dooku at the Senate Building today?” Obi-Wan said.

“No,” Tholme said, leaning forward. “When? Quinlan didn’t mention this.”

“Just a few hours ago. Anakin and I were at the Senate Building waiting for Senator Amidala of Naboo, and we ran into Dooku there.” She told them quickly what had passed, not that there was much to tell.

“This is a troubling development,” Windu said, steepling his palms.

“Know of Dooku’s retirement, do you?” asked Yoda.

“Only the rumors, Master,” Obi-Wan said. “I know that he left the Order after Qui-Gon’s death on Naboo to resume his birthright as the hereditary count of Serenno and that afterwards he spoke out publicly against both the Senate and the Order. He blamed the Senate for not supporting Naboo and the Order for letting the Jedi grow weak. But since then he’s been quiet.”

“Know, do you, that offered to become your Master after Qui-Gon’s death, he did?”

Obi-Wan blinked. “No, I didn’t.”

“Before your knighthood decided, this was. For Master Qui-Gon, his first thought was; his second for Qui-Gon’s Padawan. Tried to contact you, he did, but kept from you this was. Too many distractions you could not have.”

“By the time we returned to Coruscant, Dooku had already made the decision to leave the Jedi,” Windu said. “He was summoned before the Council to explain his resignation, but he never appeared. Until now he’s had no further contact with anyone in the Order.”

“So why me?” Obi-Wan asked. “Why now?”

“Have something to do with the new Senate bills, it may,” Yoda offered after a fraught pause. “Perhaps only for convenience or sentiment are you.”

“The new Senate bills,” Obi-Wan said slowly, trying to remember what they were. At any point in time there were thousands of bills winding their torturous way through the Senate, committee after committee working their way through them and slowly winnowing them down to the handful that would, in several years time, be presented to the entirety of the Senate. At best estimate, any bill introduced this season would make its way before the whole Senate in three or four years. The first votes would begin within the week.

“The Planetary Sovereignty Act?” she wagered after a moment’s thought. “Or the Military Creation Act?”

There were any number of bills that might catch the attention of a relatively new planetary leader, especially one with a background in the Jedi Order, but normally it took so long to shepherd a bill through the Senate that it seemed unthinkable anyone who hadn’t sponsored it would get involved this early.

“Not known yet, it is,” Yoda said serenely. “Meet with Count Dooku you will. Discern his purpose on Coruscant.”

Obi-Wan inclined her head. “Yes, Masters.”

She took her leave, Quinlan following her out after a glance back at the others to make sure that he had been dismissed as well. They fell into step together on their way down the corridor.

“Whatever Dooku said really bothered you, didn’t it?” Quin asked.

“It wasn’t his words, precisely,” Obi-Wan said; those had been innocuous enough. “It was just a feeling – something Anakin and I both felt in the Force before he arrived.” She swept a hand over her face. “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”

“You just said that your Padawan felt it too,” he pointed out. “What was it?”

“I don’t know. It felt…familiar. As if I’d felt its like before. Not that that means anything,” she added quickly. “I’ve been an active Jedi for more than fifteen years now. I’ve felt any number of odd things in the Force.”

“Including a Sith Lord,” Quin said, his voice very mild.

“I think the Jedi Council would have noticed if there was a Sith Lord in the Senate,” Obi-Wan said pointedly. “I think you’ve been hit in the head one too many times, Quinlan.”

“I know my history, Obi-Wan. Sith always come in twos.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow. “And I thought _I_ was paranoid, Quin. No, I don’t believe it’s another Sith; I’m sure the Council would be aware of it then. It may not even have anything to do with Count Dooku; there are thousands of beings in the Senate Building at any given time.”

Quin tucked his thumbs into his belt. “Do you want me to go with you to talk to Dooku?”

“What, and have him get even more suspicious because I’ve brought another Jedi Knight with me, and Master Tholme’s protégée at that? No, I have it quite under control. And Anakin will come with me, of course.”

He frowned. “Not that you aren’t a good Jedi, Obi-Wan, but –”

“There’s no indication that Dooku means to do anything aggressive against the Jedi,” Obi-Wan reminded him. “I _am_ a Jedi Knight, Quin. I have been for quite some time now. I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself and my Padawan. Besides, we’re on Coruscant. It’s not exactly the Outer Rim.”

“All right, I know,” Quinlan said quickly. “There’s just something weird going on here – I can feel it, Tholme can – why do you think Windu and Yoda showed up?”

Obi-Wan passed her hand over her face. “I’ll think about it. Blast it, I was hoping that we’d have some downtime, not this…whatever this is.”

He elbowed her companionably. “At least you have your pretty senator to keep you distracted.”

“You pervert,” Obi-Wan said, shaking her head.

“I don’t understand how you always get missions that involve gorgeous women hanging all over you and I get ones with smugglers who think bathing is optional,” he sighed.

“Just lucky, I guess. Although I hope you’re not counting Jirra the Hutt among them, because if you are, well, I’m not going to judge what you’re into, Quin, but –”

“Still your filthy tongue, Kenobi! She’s all yours!”

Their laughter drew curious glances from some of the other passing Jedi. Quinlan grinned happily at Obi-Wan. “Feel better?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan admitted. “Want to spar?”

“Want to do something less likely to end in bruises?” He accompanied this with a faint mental whisper that made his intentions clear. “It’ll take your mind off Dooku. Well, I hope it will, anyway –”

“If we have sex in my apartment,” Obi-Wan said, “Anakin will pick up on it. And then he’ll throw a fit.”

“Mine, then. Aayla knows when to take a hint.”

“If we have sex anywhere in the Temple or the grounds while Anakin is _in_ the Temple, he’ll pick up on it,” Obi-Wan said. “Don’t ask me how I know this. It’s not worth it.”

“So I’ll get Aayla to round up the senior Padawans in the Temple right now and they can take Skywalker out into the city while we have sex in my apartment,” Quinlan said practically. “If your Padawan has something against sex, Obi-Wan, he really has to get over it. I’m surprised his head hasn’t exploded already; Temple’s not exactly short on people getting it on, even once you weed out the celibates and the ascetics.”

“It’s not everyone,” Obi-Wan said, wincing. “It’s just me. And it’s not that he has anything against it, really, he’s just extremely sensitive to me. It’s been very useful on occasion.”

“Council know about this?” Quin asked, taking his comlink off his belt.

“It’s not unusual for Padawans to be extremely sensitive to their Masters,” Obi-Wan pointed out. “And Anakin’s stronger than most Padawans – stronger than most Knights, for that matter, though less skilled. And we’ve been working on it.”

Quinlan shrugged. “Glad I’m not the one with the prodigy.” He thumbed on his comlink. “Hey, Aayla, any interest in distracting Anakin Skywalker for a few hours? Preferably off Temple grounds? You can see who else is planetside right now, make an excursion out of it.”

“Why do I have the feeling I shouldn’t tell him why if he asks?” Aayla responded, sounding amused.

“Because Master Kenobi has to live with him. So are you up for it?”

“All right,” she said agreeably. “I think Sian Jeisel and Xiaan Amersu are on-planet, and I know Nahdar Vebb is here since Master Fisto is – hmm, I think I saw Master Unduli, so Barriss Offee might be here too, but she’s a little young…” She trailed off thoughtfully.

“Have fun,” Quin said cheerfully. “Come home before morning. Don’t disgrace the Order. Let me know when you’ve left the grounds with Skywalker.” He keyed his comlink off after Aayla’s affirmative.

Obi-Wan shook her head, grinning. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to be a good friend.”

“And the fact that you get to have sex with me doesn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Doesn’t hurt,” Quinlan grinned. “Unlike acrobatics in the dark while dodging laser bolts.”

Obi-Wan poked a finger into his chest. “Remember, Vos, you were right there next to me. And don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it.”

“Makes me feel all manly,” he grins. “What’s your excuse?”

“Who says I need one?” The Force gave her a split-second’s warning; she was already taking her comlink off her belt when it buzzed. “Anakin.”

“Hi, Master. Aayla Secura and some of the other Padawans are going out into the city, is it all right if I go too?” He sounded a little anxious; he’d been out of the Temple more than he’d been in it today, considering that he’d had tea with the Chancellor and dinner with Senator Amidala.

“Just don’t do anything illegal,” Obi-Wan said. “No racing.”

“What if it’s legal?”

“Anakin. No racing. And nothing you’re going to regret in the morning; we’re running simulations tomorrow and while at some point I’m going to make you do that while you’re hungover, I don’t want it to be right now.”

Even at a distance, she could sense him rolling his eyes. “Yes, Master,” he parroted obediently.

She felt his mind slide comfortably and familiarly against hers, probably not even aware he was doing it, and Obi-Wan very clearly and firmly formulated the thought, _Anakin, boundaries_. In return she got a murmur of apology as he backed off.

“See?” Quinlan said as she replaced the comlink on her belt. “All taken care of.”

“Unless this group of masterless Padawans we’ve just set loose manages to burn down half the city,” Obi-Wan said, but she was smiling.

*

Obi-Wan woke with a start to the mental equivalent of Anakin battering on her bedroom door and shouting her name. She could sense him in her room even before she opened her eyes to find him sitting on the foot of her bed, looking solemnly at her. He was barefoot, wearing only his undershirt over his trousers; Obi-Wan didn’t need to touch his mind to know that he was quite drunk.

She scrubbed a hand over her eyes, sitting up. “Anakin. What is it?”

“You have the most amazing breasts in the Order,” he told her, though thankfully his gaze was on her face, not her chest.

“Flattering, but hardly accurate,” Obi-Wan said, wondering what this was leading up to and extremely relieved that she was sleeping in a nightshirt, not just her skin – not a habit she’d ever had the leisure to pick up, fortunately.

“We voted,” he said very seriously. “Master Ti’s are really nice, and so are Master Unduli’s – or at least that’s what Bariss says, anyway – and Master Saa’s are _great_ , but they don’t really count because she’s a shapeshifter.”

Obi-Wan put her hand over her eyes. Anakin probably wouldn’t appreciate it if she laughed right now. “And I’m sure you’ve all studied this in great detail.”

“Well, it can’t be Republic laws and xenobiology all the time, Master,” Anakin said, inching slowly up the bed towards her. “Why, who do you think has nicer breasts?”

“You have no idea how much you’re going to regret this conversation once you sober up,” Obi-Wan sighed.

“I mean, you’ve probably seen more than I have.”

Obi-Wan pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “Anakin, did you wake me up just to talk about breasts or was there something else?”

Anakin was close enough to touch now. “You’re really pretty,” he told her, like a secret shared just between the two of them. “I really want to –”

“Anakin, go to bed,” Obi-Wan said hastily, layering compulsion into her voice. “Your own bed. And sleep it off.”

He blinked at her. “I’m going to my bed to sleep it off,” he said, as if it had been his idea all along, then got off her bed and wandered back out, the door sliding shut behind him.

Obi-Wan put her hand over her face, pulling her knees up to her chest and leaning on them. She was fairly certain she’d never had any conversations with Qui-Gon that had been remotely similar, though she knew she’d gotten drunk around him more than once.

The unvoiced thought had been at the forefront of Anakin’s mind. Obi-Wan couldn’t have missed it if she’d wanted to, not with the bond between them open and all Anakin’s barriers against her down.

_I really want to kiss you right now._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quinlan and Aayla's amnesia backstory from the Star Wars: Republic comics is not being used here.


	3. Chapter 3

Anakin, when he finally emerged from his bedroom the next morning, did not mention the conversation of the night before. Obi-Wan was fairly certain he remembered it, since he tottered out of his room, took one look at her, blushed bright red, and staggered into the ‘fresher. In the spirit of magnanimity she’d refrained from hauling him out of bed at the crack of dawn as she had originally planned, and had instead occupied the intervening hours with quiet meditation and, as she was doing now, paging slowly through this season’s new Senate bills on a datapad to see if anything leapt out at her. She’d also commed Dooku as per the Council’s orders but against her better instincts, and had been glad to get a protocol droid on the other end instead of Dooku himself.

Anakin wandered back out of the ‘fresher eventually, still looking rather green. Obi-Wan flipped from the Spaceport Beautification Bill (well-meant but doomed) to the controversial Planetary Sovereignty Bill. There was a list of the committee members at the bottom of the HoloNet entry on the bill; Obi-Wan scrolled down it absently, then stopped and scrolled back up. _Naboo, Padmé Amidala_ , near the middle – the Senators were listed by planet instead of surname. Near the top of the list was Padmé’s friend Clovis, as _Banking Clan (Scipio), Rush Clovis_. It must have been the same committee that Padmé had been in yesterday – the one where Dooku and Obi-Wan had met.

Obi-Wan tapped a finger against the edge of the datapad, reading over the remaining committee members. She didn’t know most of them, but a few names were familiar from reputation. Besides Padmé and Clovis, there was only one other Senator that Obi-Wan knew personally, at the very top of the list: _Alderaan, Bail Organa_.

“Did you have a good time last night?” she asked without looking up as Anakin edged carefully out of the kitchen, carrying a steaming cup of black, bitter Tatooinian tea. He folded himself into an armchair, balancing the mug on his knee.

“I’m never drinking again,” he informed her sadly. “Can you use the Force to make a hangover go away?”

“You can use it to metabolize alcohol more quickly,” Obi-Wan told him. “It’s the same basic process as purging poison from the body.”

“Oh,” Anakin said, clearly weighing the effort of doing so against waiting out the hangover.

Obi-Wan leaned the datapad against her knee. “Did you learn anything?”

“Devaronians don’t get drunk,” Anakin said.

“They do,” Obi-Wan said. “It just takes them a little longer than it takes humans.”

“A _lot_ longer.” He massaged his forehead. “So, uh, were you with Master Vos last night? Is that why he had Aayla and the others get me out of the Temple?”

“Not that it’s any of your concern, but yes,” Obi-Wan said after a moment’s hesitation, finally deciding on honesty rather than prevarication. “Are you guessing or are you using the Force?”

He blew on his tea, then remembered he was a Jedi and put his hand over the top of the mug, leaching the warmth away until it was cool enough to drink comfortably. “I – don’t know?” he said eventually. “I can’t really tell.”

“Hmm,” Obi-Wan said. It didn’t really mean anything; Jedi guesses tended to be unconscious Force use, and it was far from the worst thing Anakin had ever picked up on inadvertently. She hadn’t really been intending on hiding it from him anyway; secrets were the last thing that Master and Padawan needed hanging in the air between them.

“Oh, and Tae Diath mentioned it,” he added. “He’s a telepath. I bet he picked it up from Aayla’s mind.” He scowled. “And Master Diath says _my_ control is bad, he should pay more attention to his own Padawan.”

“Telepaths use the Force differently than the rest of us ordinary Jedi,” Obi-Wan reminded him, running her hand through the myriad tiny braids she’d spent the better part of an hour putting her hair in this morning. “Although Padawan Diath really shouldn’t go around saying things like that.”

“Hmmph.” Anakin wrapped his hands around his mug, sipping slowly. “I thought you said we were going to be running simulations today.”

“We will be,” Obi-Wan said. “You came in pretty late last night – well, this morning – and I thought I’d let you sleep it off so you could start off running the obstacle course with a hangover instead of while still drunk.”

He winced. “Am I in trouble?”

“No. Think of it as a learning experience. Besides, you made some important connections with other Padawans. One day, you’ll all be Knights together.”

Anakin squinted at her over the rim of his cup, looking slightly dubious, but before he could say anything, Obi-Wan’s holocomm beeped at her. She leaned over to thumb it on, hoping that it wasn’t Count Dooku.

It turned out to be her friend Kit Fisto, who was serving a term as Temple gatekeeper while his Padawan took some of the same upper-level classes Anakin was in. “Morning, Obi-Wan,” he said, bowing slightly to her.

Obi-Wan bowed back from her seated position. “Hello, Kit. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a senator here asking for you. Shall I send her up or would you rather come down?”

“Amidala of Naboo?” Obi-Wan asked, surprised. She’d seen Padmé only yesterday; she couldn’t think of anything urgent enough to would bring her to the Temple so soon afterwards. Anakin perked up at her name, all his attention going to Kit, like a hound on point.

“Mothma of Chandrila. You know her?”

The name was familiar. Obi-Wan glanced down at the datapad in her lap, spotting Mon Mothma’s name on the list on the list of committee members. “Not personally, no,” she said. “Only by reputation.”

Kit looked vaguely interested. “Shall I send her up?”

“No, I’ll come down and meet her in the water gardens,” Obi-Wan decided, setting the datapad aside. “Thanks, Kit.”

He nodded, but paused before turning off the holocomm to say, “By the way, do you have any idea what our Padawans were doing last night? I think Nahdar’s locked himself in the ‘fresher.”

“I think it’s better if we don’t know,” Obi-Wan said, while Anakin looked rather sheepish.

“You may be correct,” Kit said solemnly, flickering out of sight as the holocomm shut off. Obi-Wan straightened up and went to go find her boots.

“Who’s Mothma of Chandrila?” Anakin asked.

“Another Senator. Padmé mentioned her to me once.”

“Should I come –”

Obi-Wan grinned at him. “See if you can figure out how to use the Force to get rid of your hangover.”

Anakin made a whimpering sound as she picked up her cloak and went outside.

Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila turned out to be a handsome human woman of about Obi-Wan’s own age, with short red hair and a determined expression. She had an aide with her, a pale pink Twi’lek teenager in Chandrilan dress.

“Senator Mothma?” Obi-Wan said, approaching her. “I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

“Master Kenobi, what a pleasure,” Mothma said. “I don’t believe we’ve met before, but Padmé Amidala and Bail Organa speak very highly of you. Shall we walk?”

“Of course, Senator,” Obi-Wan said. They fell into step together, Mothma’s aide trailing behind them. It was spring on Coruscant, a clear, warm day. The bright sun struck sparks off the glimmering water all around them – pools and waterfalls and little artificial streams filled with fish imported from a thousand worlds, with various walking paths twining cleverly around them. There were several other Jedi about, quiet and absorbed in their own worlds; they saw that Obi-Wan was with a senator and politely went the other way. “What can I do for you?”

“Are you familiar with the Planetary Sovereignty Bill and the Senate Discretion Bill? They’ve both been introduced this season.”

Obi-Wan tucked her hands into her sleeves. “I know of them, yes, but I’m not terribly familiar – my Padawan and I were off-planet on a mission until a few days ago. The Planetary Sovereignty Bill would limit the Senate’s ability to intervene in planetary affairs, correct? While the Senate Discretion Bill would do the opposite.”

“Essentially, yes. Neither option is terribly attractive.”

Obi-Wan didn’t say anything, waiting. She didn’t disagree – at its most extreme, the Planetary Sovereignty Bill could be taken as the next step to dissolving the Republic, while the Senate Discretion Bill held within it the seed of stripping all member planets of their individual rights. If she read more closely, she suspected she might find limitations on the Jedi Order in each.

“I don’t see where I come in,” she said eventually, when it became clear that Senator Mothma is waiting for a response. “I’m just a Jedi Knight, Senator. I don’t have any influence in the Senate.”

“You have more than you think, Master Kenobi,” Senator Mothma said, obviously choosing her words carefully. Obi-Wan could sense the microseconds of hesitation as Mothma tried to decide how best to convince Obi-Wan – not the way a Jedi would have, but the way ordinary beings did, by guesses and estimates.

“I’m giving a dinner the night before the vote for the committee members that are hesitating about the bill,” Mothma said finally. “The presence of a Jedi would go a long way towards persuading those who are uncertain to vote against it.”

“I see,” Obi-Wan said. “Why me? There are other, more important Jedi in the Order that you could ask – Master Gallia, or Master Tiin –”

Mon Mothma shook her head. “You’re quite well known in some circles for what you did on Naboo, and your association with Senators Organa and Amidala won’t hurt. Your presence at the dinner would go unremarked, while a Jedi Master like Adi Gallia or Saesee Tiin would make the bill seem more important. I don’t want this bill to make it out of committee.”

“I see,” Obi-Wan said, tugging on one of her braids. “You’re on the committee along with Senator Organa and Senator Amidala, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“And you aren’t concerned about the Senate Discretion Bill?”

“Onaconda Farr of Rodia and Lott Dod of the Trade Federation have finally found common ground in their mutual hatred of that bill,” Mothma said, with a slight smile. “And both are on the committee. I am confident that it will be defeated as well. So what do you say, Master Kenobi? I can guarantee that at the least you’ll get a good dinner.”

Obi-Wan released the braid, tucking it behind her ear with the rest. “Will you supply me with everything you have on the bill before I make a decision, Senator? As I said, I’m not terribly familiar with the bill.”

“Of course,” Mothma agreed immediately. “I thought you might ask as much – Griaa, the disc?”

Her Twi’lek aide produced it immediately, holding it out to Obi-Wan. She took it, thanking the girl. “You were that confident, Senator?”

“I’ve known a Jedi or two myself, Master Kenobi,” Mothma said, smiling a little. “Even if you had said no, I would have asked you to take it and look it over to see if it changed your mind.”

Obi-Wan slipped the disc into her pocket. “I’ll be in touch, Senator. How long do I have?”

“The vote is in three days,” Mothma said. “The dinner is in two.”

Obi-Wan nodded. “By the way, Senator Mothma – was this Senator Amidala’s idea?”

“No. I don’t think she’d risk her friendship with you by trying to bring politics into it.” Mothma looked steadily at Obi-Wan. They were the same species, same age, same height and general appearance. A casual observer might have taken them for sisters. From the little Obi-Wan knew of her own birth family, if she hadn’t been discovered by the Order, she might have grown up to follow a very similar path. A thread of the Force told Obi-Wan that Mothma was having the same thought.

After a moment, Mothma went on, “Bail Organa told me that you don’t approve of politics.”

“Approval has nothing to do with it,” Obi-Wan said, looking away at a miniature waterfall. “With a few exceptions, I don’t particularly like politicians – no offense meant, Senator.”

“None taken,” Mothma said, with a faint hint of amusement thrumming through the Force. “Perhaps I can change your mind about at least one more politician, Master Kenobi.”

“I hope so,” Obi-Wan said and smiled at her.

She escorted the senator back to the visitor landing platform, their conversation turning to some of the bills that had survived the gauntlet of Senate committees and were up for the vote before the whole Senate this season. In the current political climate, anything that lasted this long tended to be fluff legislation – harmless and relatively uncontroversial. Mothma seemed frustrated by this, but relatively resigned. Better fluff legislation than anything more sinister, Obi-Wan sensed, and had to agree. Of course, it was legislation like this that led people to suggest that the Republic was corrupt and inefficient.

She saw Senator Mothma off, then went slowly back up to her apartment, where she found Anakin reading through a holofile on lightsaber modifications he’d copied from the Archives. “Why don’t more Jedi have lightsabers that work underwater?” he asked. “I mean, we don’t need it that often, but when we need it, we really, really need it.”

“You have the file, my young apprentice, you tell me,” Obi-Wan said, shedding her cloak and setting the holodisc Mothma had given her aside for future perusal.

“Uh –” He flipped several pages forward. “It’s difficult, and if done incorrectly, it can cause a lightsaber to short out at irregular intervals, including in areas of high humidity or in rain. Or in some cases, explode.”

“Very inconvenient, that,” Obi-Wan told him with feeling.

“When did your lightsaber explode?”

“When I was fifteen and in the middle of a firefight. I had second degree burns up to the elbow on both arms and a hole in my shoulder where a blaster bolt got through.” She rubbed the spot, remembering.

Anakin winced.

“Indeed,” Obi-Wan said serenely. “Though by all means do so, you’re somewhat more advanced at lightsaber engineering than I was at your age.”

He smiled. “I’m not going to make anything explode, Master Obi-Wan,” he said. “I mean, not unless I want it too.”

“Good,” Obi-Wan said. “Fortunately you might be about to get the chance. Come on. I’ve reserved one of the simulation rooms and we’re already late.”

Anakin scrambled up, abandoning the holofile and diving into his bedroom for his lightsaber. He had apparently worked out the trick for getting rid of a hangover with the Force, since he seemed considerably perkier than he had when Obi-Wan had left to meet Senator Mothma. He emerged hopping on one foot, then the other as he pulled his boots, lightsaber clipped to his belt.

“What did that senator want?” he asked, following Obi-Wan out into the hallway.

She swept a hand through her braids absently. “Nothing important.”

*

Sims took up most of the day; when they finally finished up, Anakin staggered into the padawan locker rooms while Obi-Wan dragged herself into the knights’ lockers and stood under the shower for a good fifteen minutes, sluicing dirt and sweat off her skin and hissing when the hot water hit the innumerable tiny scratches she’d picked up.

“Nice, Kenobi,” Kadrian Sey said, slapping her on the shoulder when she emerged. “You and that boy of yours have a talent for chaos.”

Obi-Wan started toweling off. “Well, he has a talent for something, all right.”

Sey straddled one of the benches, relaxed in loose workout pants and a tight top that showed off her muscled arms, with tattoos running from wrist to shoulder, more tattoos on her face. Obi-Wan didn’t know her well; Sey usually worked alone on the Outer Rim, with a reputation for being a little reckless, a little bit of a rebel, a little too eager to push the boundaries of the Jedi Code. Rumor was that she was back on Coruscant for a hearing in front of the Council of Reconciliation, but it could as easily be a regular post-mission debrief. She and Obi-Wan didn’t exactly run in the same circles.

“I heard you did good work on Derith Nahar,” Sey went on.

Obi-Wan let her mouth quirk. “Is this about how the pirate captain wanted to marry me or about how my padawan blew up half a space station?”

“I hear you blew up the other half.”

“Not, I assure you, my preferred method of dealing with pirates,” Obi-Wan said.

“It is mine,” Sey said, and smiled, comfortable.

“That why they pulled you off Nar Shaddaa, Sey?” Quinlan said, breezing into the room with a duffle bag over his shoulder.

“Kark on you, Vos,” Sey snapped over her shoulder.

Obi-Wan reached for a fresh set of clothes and started to dress, pulling her braids free of the collar of her shirt. Quin dropped the duffle onto the bench with a thump and opened it up to pull out his workout clothes, shedding his regular robes for gear he didn’t mind getting scuffed up.

“Actually,” he said, directed at Obi-Wan but pitched for both of them, “I heard it was murder. Some spice supplier, cutting half-rate stuff with poison, dead and comatose kids all over Nar Shaddaa. Even the Hutts started paying attention. You know, the rest of us, it bothers us that much, we mindtrick first and ask questions when we get them in custody.” He dropped his robes on top of his duffle and snaked a hand out towards Sey’s lightsaber. “Someone asks me to read that, what do you think I’ll pull off it?”

Sey punched him in the face.

Quin hit her back, and then Obi-Wan dove over the bench and tackled him to the floor while Ord Enisence grabbed Sey around the waist, holding her off the floor as she shouted and swore and tried to get at Quinlan. Everyone else in the lockers – not too many people, it was around dinner time – looked at them in astonished shock that any Jedi, even two with the reputations of Kadrian Sey and Quinlan Vos, would ever behave that way.

“Come on, Obi-Wan, get off me,” Quin coaxed, comfortable and limp beneath her. “You weigh a ton. I’m going to tell that padawan of yours to feed you less.”

“If you tell Anakin anything, it’s going to be how to do that trick of yours where you walk through a crowded room without anyone seeing you,” Obi-Wan told him, but she did get off him, because she trusted Quinlan not to throw a second punch, even if she didn’t trust Kadrian Sey.

“Let me go, Enisence, I’ve got it under control,” Sey snapped, rolling Enisence’s three-fingered grip off his slim shoulders, hair whipping around. She sneered at Quinlan as he sat up. “And for your information, Vos, there were mitigating circumstances. Self-defense.”

“Maybe on Nar Shaddaa,” Quinlan said, still sitting on the floor with Obi-Wan hovering over him, “But that’s not what I hear about that Duros on Dantooine.”

Sey made another furious move at him, and Obi-Wan got between them, both hands held out and the Force hovering at her fingertips. “Stop it!” she said, in the same voice she used on Anakin when he let his instincts and his temper get the better of him. “Both of you, stop it right now. You’re Jedi, you know better. Master Sey, get out of here and go cool down, Master Vos, just stop aggravating her.”

“This is unfitting for Jedi Knights,” Enisence added in his deep, smooth voice.

Quinlan stepped back, hands held up. “Hey, I’m fine. I’m great.”

“You’re an idiot,” Obi-Wan tells him, which he took with a grin.

“You’re all idiots,” Sey snapped, and shoved past Enisence on her way to the door. She hit the control for it and looked back as it slid soundlessly open. “Except for you, Kenobi. Your taste in companions is awful, but I like your style. Meet you tomorrow on the sparring mats?”

Obi-Wan made an indeterminate motion with her hand that might have meant “yes” or “no,” and Sey just grinned, the smile showing her pointed Zabrak teeth. Her hair whipped over her shoulders as she left.

“What in blazes was that about, Quin?” Obi-Wan demanded as he straightened back up.

“That stunt she pulled on Nar Shaddaa ruined my op,” Quinlan said. He tossed her discarded tunic at her, and Obi-Wan shrugged it on, settling the folds at precise angles across her chest.

“Holding grudges is not in the Jedi Code,” Ord Enisence said pointedly.

“I’m not holding it anymore,” Quinlan grinned.

“Stars have mercy,” Obi-Wan said, pulling her boots on and shrugging her cloak on. “You _are_ an idiot.”

She picked up her bag and followed Sey out, nodding a farewell to Ord Enisence. Anakin was waiting in the hallway, his hair wet from washing; he straightened up from his slump against the wall and fell into step with her. “Who was that who just came out, Master?”

“Kadrian Sey,” Obi-Wan said. “Just back from Nar Shaddaa, apparently.”

“She looked like she was in a bad mood.”

“Quinlan Vos can do that to a person.”

Anakin nodded, though he didn’t say anything else. Obi-Wan didn’t know if he’d heard the rumors about Sey; she assumed he had, since Jedi gossiped like old women, and there had apparently been more than a little of that going on last night. Sey wasn’t her problem, though, and neither was Quinlan Vos; Obi-Wan’s mind was already back in the water gardens with Mon Mothma, running through everything the senator had said to her, and she made a sudden decision.

“Here,” she said, handing her bag to Anakin. “I’m going out. Try not to worry.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see an old friend,” Obi-Wan said, and made a hard right at the next corner, turning down a small corridor that will get her to the speeder platform in less than five minutes. She could feel Anakin staring after her, his curiosity a soft buzz at the back of her mind. Knowing Anakin, he was going to worry anyway.

She took an open speeder, mostly to feel the air on her face. The sun was setting, painting the city in purple and gold, the tall buildings all around her lit up with light. Obi-Wan wasn’t in love with Coruscant – won’t be and can’t be – but the city-planet was the only home that she remembered, if not the only home she’d ever known if her personnel file wasn’t lying. It was funny, in a way, because Qui-Gon had been almost violent in his dislike of Coruscant – or at least as violent as Qui-Gon ever got outside the training rooms or the field, anyway – and Obi-Wan had wondered why for years until she’d finally gotten up the courage to ask him. She couldn’t remember his exact words anymore, but it had been something about how unnatural the planet was – how there wasn’t a single speck of land on Coruscant that hadn’t been manipulated by sentient beings somehow, how it twisted up the Living Force. Obi-Wan mostly remembered the expression on his face when she’d looked at him in astonishment and said, “But isn’t that a part of the Living Force too?”

All around her the Force thrummed with life, millions upon billions of beings going about their business. Obi-Wan basked in it, the familiar pulse of Coruscant, and twisted her speeder comfortably through the streams of moving traffic until she finally reached her destination.

Bail Organa was, as Obi-Wan had suspected, working, sitting at the big dining table in his 500 Republica apartment with flimsiplasts and holofiles spread out around him. Obi-Wan, starting to smile, had one of those terrifying flashes of precognition the Force had been prone to giving her since she’d been child: a layered image, like a badly altered hologram, there and gone between one heartbeat and the next. Obi-Wan breathed in, trying to shake off the sudden double image of a Bail Organa some ten years older, sitting at the same table with a dark haired toddler in his lap, a girl who glanced up at Obi-Wan with Padmé Amidala’s eyes and Anakin’s strong features. It didn’t mean anything – the Force only showed Obi-Wan what might be, not what would be. It was still shocking, the same way it always was, the way it had been when she’d looked at Qui-Gon and Darth Maul in the seconds before Qui-Gon died and seen it happen. Sometimes what she saw was what happened.

She shoved the vision to the back of her mind, bowing to Bail as he came around the side of the table, smiling.

“Master Kenobi! To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

“Hello, Senator,” Obi-Wan said, her smile genuine. She and Senator Organa had met several years back, when she’d taken Anakin and a dozen younglings to Alderaan for a training mission and ran smack into the middle of an extensive smuggling operation, to the horror of everyone involved, including the smugglers, who’d reacted to the abrupt arrival of a Jedi Knight, a Padawan, and twelve younglings by blaming the whole thing on Queen Breha. “How are you? How is your wife?”

“Breha is pregnant again,” he said, undertones of worry in his voice. Obi-Wan found herself waiting for a shiver in the Force, something to tell her that the child she’d seen in the vision was the one Queen Breha was carrying, but there was nothing: after that first disturbance, the Force lay quiet and placid around them. And somehow that was worse.

“I’m going back to Alderaan as soon as the current vote is over,” Bail went on, not seeming to notice her minute hesitation.

Obi-Wan dragged her mind back to the matter at hand. “That would be the Planetary Sovereignty Bill?”

“You’ve been talking to Mon Mothma,” Bail said wryly, guiding her to a seat with a light touch on her elbow. “Or Padmé Amidala? I saw you two together the other day.”

“Senator Mothma,” Obi-Wan said. “She’s very intense.”

“Mon is that. She did mention something about you, I guess I should have seen it coming that she’d approach you – this is about the dinner, isn’t it?”

Obi-Wan tipped her head in a nod. “This morning. Can you tell me about the bill?”

Bail nodded, tapping his fingers on the table. “It was proposed by the delegation from Devaron – that’s Elsah’sai’Moro, do you know her?”

When she shook her head, he went on. “It was a bit of a surprise; they’ve been talking about the Senate Discretion Bill, or something like it, for years now, but the Planetary Sovereignty Bill came out of nowhere. You should have seen the Senate when Senator Elsah introduced it; half of them applauded and the other half were having kittens on the spot.”

“That good, hmm?” Obi-Wan said, wrapping a braid around her hand. 

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” He signaled his droid, who poured them both drinks. “In essence, the Planetary Sovereignty Bill would give Republic planets greater independence, allow them to refuse extradition, reduces taxes – for certain taxes, it gives the planet the right to refuse to pay – and it would allow individual planets the right to forbid Republic officials setting foot planetside. Including Jedi.”

Obi-Wan had been trained to control her features, keep the quirk of her lips from betraying her mind, but Bail Organa was a friend; she let the expression on her face speak volumes.

“I thought that might get your attention,” he said.

“I hadn’t heard about that,” Obi-Wan said, frowning.

“It’s buried deep. There are a few other nasty surprises in there – I don’t think Elsah put them in, it’s not her style, but none of the co-authors have come forward yet. We have our ideas, though. There’s been a lot of unrest these past six years – what happened on Naboo was just the beginning. Thousands of planets deal with the Trade Federation, and the idea that the Trade Federation could invade a planet without Republic reprisal really shook them, Jedi or not.” He trailed his fingers over the condensation on his glass, looking down into its depths.

“We’ve been aware of that for some time now,” Obi-Wan admitted. “It backed off a bit immediately after Naboo, but it’s been getting worse in the past year or so – what happened on Derith Nahar is proof of that, even though that wasn’t interplanetary.” She sat back, taking a sip from the glass and finding it was ardees, bitter and alcoholic. “I hadn’t considered that the Senate would be pushing back at the Republic too, but I should have. Most Jedi don’t think about the Senate if they can help it.” She shrugged a little. “Most Jedi don’t have to.”

“I’ve always wondered why the Jedi don’t have representation in the Senate,” Bail remarked. “Surely you have as much right to sit in the Senate as the Trade Federation or the Banking Clan.”

“Traditionally, we do, actually,” Obi-Wan said, dredging up the memory of her political science lessons from her youngling years. “It just hasn’t been used in centuries. Most Jedi would rather eat their own lightsabers than have to deal directly with the Senate.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” He gave her an edge of a smile. “Don’t tell Mon, she’ll have you answering to ‘Senator Kenobi’ within the week.”

Obi-Wan made a face. “No thanks. Some people already think that the Jedi have too much power; I’d rather not fan that particular flame. And it will be a rare Jedi that says otherwise.” She tugged at a braid. “I probably shouldn’t even have told you that, though it’s not officially a secret.”

Bail shrugged. “Why shouldn’t the Jedi have as much voice in the running of the Republic as anyone else? You’ve certainly done enough to protect it.”

“And that’s where our place is,” Obi-Wan said decisively. “We’ll leave the politics to you, Senator. We’ll keep the peace, you make it.”

He gave her an edge of a smile. “As you say, Obi-Wan. I think the Senate could use some shaking up.”

“Maybe it does,” Obi-Wan said, “but I’m not the one to do it.” She drank more of the ardees, letting the taste blossom on her tongue. “So the bill –”

“Oh, it has its points,” Bail said, leaning back in his chair and playing with his glass, the condensation wetting his fingers. “Otherwise so many senators wouldn’t be convinced by it. Very few people like paying Republic tariffs, and most systems don’t enjoy having outsiders – sorry – poking into their business if some other senator gets it up his nose that there’s Jedi business about. Do you remember the Stark Hyperspace Wars?”

“Vividly. I was there.”

He looked interested. “Really? I hadn’t known that. That must have been almost twenty years ago –”

“Fifteen,” Obi-Wan said. “I was thirteen, a new Padawan. It was one of my first missions with Master Qui-Gon.”

Bail nodded, still looking curious. “Well, this bill would more or less legalize the war. The number of hoops the Senate would have to jump through to do anything would practically double overnight.”

“That war practically _was_ legal,” Obi-Wan scowled. “And don’t take this the wrong way, Bail, but it practically takes an executive order for the Senate to do anything as it is, not without being bogged down in committees for a decade. By which point –” She stopped abruptly, because the words that were next on her tongue had been _good Jedi are dead and the problem’s resolved itself._

“Yes,” Bail said. “With this bill, even an executive order wouldn’t have much impact. It would make the Senate obsolete.”

“It can’t be that serious,” Obi-Wan said. “No senator would really put themselves out of a job.”

“Senators are not always the wisest bunch,” Bail said. He took another sip of his ardees and leaned forward. “Obi-Wan, I do think that if this bill makes it through committee, in three years it will be up before the entire Senate and then it _will_ pass. And when it does, within a century there won’t be a Republic anymore. There probably won’t be a Jedi Order anymore, either.”

“There will always be Jedi,” Obi-Wan said automatically, but a faint tremor in the Force told her that Bail was right. “I need to do more research before I can commit myself,” she compromised.

“Of course,” Bail said, standing at the same time she did. “It’s good to see you again, Obi-Wan. It’s been too long. And I’m glad the circumstances are better this time.”

“As am I. Well, we may be seeing each other soon.” She smiled at him. “Give Queen Breha my regards.”

“I will. She’ll be glad to hear from you.” He made a gesture towards his protocol droid, which stepped forward obediently. It showed Obi-Wan back to her speeder, past the sole Senate Guard assigned to Bail Organa – Bail wasn’t so important a senator to rate more than one – and out to the landing pad, which was lively this time of night. Obi-Wan saw a dozen senators that she knew by sight alone, though none that she had any passing acquaintance with. None of them seemed interested to see her here; Jedi weren’t exactly a rare sight on Coruscant, even at 500 Republica.

Obi-Wan thanked the protocol droid politely and climbed back into her speeder, gathering her cloak tightly around herself – the temperature had fallen since she’d arrived, and the wind was cold on her face and her still damp hair as she turned the speeder back towards the Jedi Temple, dropping into the ebb and flow of air traffic. She could see the towers of the Temple lit up a long way off, and felt Anakin’s presence in the back of her mind as she approached, deep in meditation for a change. She could sense him perk up and start to lose control of the meditation as he noted her approach. He must have been trying traditional meditation, not his usual active meditation; he was easily distracted if he didn’t have something to concentrate on. If she was a betting woman, Obi-Wan would have placed money on his coming down to the landing platform to meet her. She was pleasantly surprised to find that he hadn’t when she landed; Anakin didn’t exactly have a habit for patience unless he was coaxing miracles out of electronics.

She went back up to her apartment through the familiar hallways of the Temple, past knights and padawans and groups of younglings who stopped to bow politely to her. The lingering evening light came in through the stained glass windows, writing colors of red and gold across floors and wall. It was so familiar and so loved that Obi-Wan almost missed the faint prickle of the Force across her skin: for half a heartbeat, the colors weren’t stained glass, but fire. Then the vision passed, and it was just stained glass again.


	4. Chapter 4

The last time Obi-Wan had been in the presence of this many politicians, she’d been briefly undercover as one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens as Amidala addressed the Senate. She’d been told later that Qui-Gon’s orders for the temporary assignment had seemed to border on paranoid, but the encounter with the Sith Lord on Tatooine had disturbed him more than the Council had realized. He couldn’t openly place a Jedi with the Queen without tipping his hand, but once in uniform, with her lightsaber hidden beneath her skirts and her hair covered, her padawan braid pulled out of the way, Obi-Wan had been indistinguishable from the other handmaidens. Fortunately she hadn’t been needed; Darth Maul’s target hadn’t been Amidala, but the Jedi. As Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan had learned only too well.

This time she was with Padmé again, but openly as a Jedi Knight, wearing her usual plain Jedi robes and her lightsaber on her belt. She relinquished her cloak at the door to a protocol droid and followed Padmé into the wide, well-lit room, ignoring the prickle at the back of her neck. The problem with being in the presence of a lot of politicians was that their greed and selfishness – among other, even less attractive traits, depending on the politician – tended to overwhelm everything else in the Force. Obi-Wan had the strong suspicion that was why she got a headache every time she went to the Senate Building to pick up Anakin from the Supreme Chancellor’s office. It needn’t even have been the Chancellor, just the combined presence of the Senate Building itself and all its occupants.

She snagged two glasses of wine from a passing rabbit droid carrying a tray of them, handing one to Padmé and keeping the other in hopes that the alcohol would help her concentrate on whatever the Force was trying to tell her. Senator Mothma hadn’t gone so far as to ask her to use the Force to find out which senators were going to vote yay or nay on the bill, which Obi-Wan wouldn’t have agreed to even if she had, but there was no harm in paying attention. Knowing the intentions of various senators could be very helpful to a Jedi Knight.

“I’m sorry Mon dragged you into this,” Padmé murmured to her as they went down the steps into the main room, which was wide and open, with a verandah that looked out over the city. “I know you dislike politics.”

“I’m considering it an educational experience,” Obi-Wan replied, letting her gaze flicker across the crowd without settling on anyone in particular. There were several dozen senators here, with more representatives and an equal number of lobbyists, along with their spouses, children, aides, and assorted hangers-on. Blue-uniformed Senate guards were stationed discreetly all around the room, still as statues, though Obi-Wan could see their gazes flickering across the room, constantly cautious. Mon Mothma had hired a band for the evening, made up of several different species, which had set up on a small stage apparently built for the occasion and was playing the usual uninspiring collection of classical Coruscanti music. Both server droids and guests were ignoring them. Everyone glittered, dressed up for the occasion as if it was more than just a dinner to cozen votes for a bill in its preliminary stages. In her unadorned Jedi robes, Obi-Wan was fairly certain she was the most plainly-dressed being in the room, though that wasn’t exactly an unusual feeling.

“If I’d known she’d try something like this, I would have stopped her,” Padmé replied, stopping to greet the representative from Umbara. Obi-Wan let herself be introduced, then returned the Umbaran’s bow, standing back and sipping at her wine as Padmé and the other woman exchanged a few words about the weather, then the bill before they both moved on.

“It’s all right,” Obi-Wan said, taking up the conversation’s dropped thread. “I wasn’t forced to be here; if I’d been that opposed to it I wouldn’t have come.”

“Well, I’m glad you came,” Padmé said, turning her brilliant smile on Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan smiled back, unable to resist. Padmé Amidala always had had that effect on her.

She was about to reply when she felt a tremor in the Force, like a fly stepping on a spider’s web – or maybe a fellow spider, come to think of it; Obi-Wan knew a Jedi when one entered the room, even if they’d never met. She touched Padmé’s wrist to get her attention and turned to see what had caused the disturbance.

It was the Supreme Chancellor and two of his friends, Senator Viento and the Jedi Master Ronhar Kim. Padmé held out her hand to be kissed, while Obi-Wan bowed slightly as they exchanged greetings. The two Jedi stepped aside as the politicians spoke.

“It’s Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, isn’t it?” said Kim, a tall human male with most of his dark hair pulled back into a topknot, the rest of it in two tails on either side of his face. “I don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced, but I’ve met your padawan once or twice.”

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or alarmed,” Obi-Wan said, smiling.

He tipped his head at the Chancellor, who had been joined by Mon Mothma and Bail Organa. “We have a mutual friend. I believe that our padawans share classes as well.”

“Of course,” Obi-Wan murmured, wondering why Anakin had never mentioned Master Kim before. She finished her wine and handed the empty glass off to a passing droid, tucking her hands into her sleeves. “You and Chancellor Palpatine are close friends?”

“My birth father was his predecessor as the senator from Naboo,” Kim explained. “We met at his funeral. Just before he died, Vidar Kim asked me to leave the Jedi and return to Naboo with him. His wife and son – my mother and brother – had just been killed.” He spoke of his birth family in the same impersonal tones that most of the Jedi did. “It was Palpatine who convinced me that remaining with the Order was the best decision for the Republic.”

“Well, I’m glad he did,” Obi-Wan said. “Give me a Jedi over a politician any day.”

He gave her an edge of a smile. “You don’t like politicians, Master Kenobi?” The faint tilt of his head encompassed the entire room.

Obi-Wan grinned back. “There are a few whom I’m not utterly opposed to.”

“Ah, Master Kenobi,” said Palpatine, moving his attention from Padmé to her.

Obi-Wan turned to face him, bowing from the waist. “Your Excellency.”

“It’s a pleasure to see you, as always,” he said, with that faintly disbelieving mental undertone that Obi-Wan was used to by now, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was talking to her and not someone more important. “I see you haven’t brought Anakin with you,” he went on, looking around as if he expected to see Anakin appear out of the crowd.

Obi-Wan gave him a thin smile, not feeling particularly inclined to go for the effort it would take to make it seem genuine. “My padawan has his studies to attend to.”

“Of course,” Palpatine said, this time with an undertone that meant, _not at all_. Obi-Wan gripped her wrists beneath her sleeves, keeping her expression placid as she returned his steady gaze. After a moment he dropped his gaze, unable to hold a Jedi’s eyes for very long. If Obi-Wan had been a pettier woman, she might have smirked; as it was, she was left with a faint sense of unease that she couldn’t quite place, a faint chill running down her spine as the Force tried and failed to tell her something.

The disturbance in the Force, if that was what it was, was quickly eclipsed by her own annoyance as the Chancellor changed the subject. “My dear girl,” he said, in that placid tone that made Obi-Wan grate her back teeth, “I’ve heard a rumor that you and Count Dooku of Serenno have been corresponding.”

Obi-Wan gripped her wrists beneath her sleeves. “‘Corresponding’ is a rather strong word, your Excellency. Before he left the Jedi Order, the Count was my master Qui-Gon’s master. Think of it as an unfortunate and unavoidable family reunion.” Not that many Jedi were privy to those, thank the Force.

Palpatine raised one white eyebrow. Obi-Wan was uncomfortably aware of everyone watching – the four senators, Master Kim, the rest of the room (even if most of their attention wasn’t on the conversation, just the Chancellor’s presence). “Don’t you find it curious that Count Dooku has contacted you just as you’ve expressed an interest in politics?”

“He actually contacted me before Senator Mothma did,” Obi-Wan said. “I truly believe that it’s just a coincidence, your Excellency, not a conspiracy.”

“Is a man who left the Jedi Order so – publicly – really the best influence to have around young Anakin?” said the Chancellor, with the faintest emphasis on the adverb.

Obi-Wan gritted her teeth, but smoothed her voice out for her reply. “My padawan knows what he is, your Excellency. A five minute meeting with a former Jedi Master will hardly change his mind.” _If you haven’t managed to do so in the past six years_ , but she tamped down the thought quickly, cursing herself for the near slip.

The Chancellor paused long enough that Obi-Wan started counting her quickening heartbeats – what _was_ it about the man, anyway? – before replying, “Of course you know best, my dear girl. Anakin is so lucky to have you as his master.”

Obi-Wan gave him a thin smile. “Thank you for your kind words, your Excellency.”

“I do hope your new interest in politics won’t impact his training at all,” the Chancellor added breezily.

He turned away before Obi-Wan could reply. She gripped her wrists so hard that she could feel her fingernails digging into the soft flesh, certain she was radiating cold fury at anyone sensitive enough to pick up on it and trying furiously to get herself under control. She was a Jedi Knight, after all, and the Supreme Chancellor was only another politician who didn’t know any better, he shouldn’t have been able to make her that angry with only a few words –

Ronhar Kim, who was probably the only Force-sensitive being in the room, leveled his steady, patient gaze on her, calm radiating out from him through the Force; Obi-Wan closed her eyes and gave herself until the count of five to open them again, adding a slight mental tendril of thanks in Kim’s direction. She got a tendril of acknowledgment back from him, but no disapproval, for which she was grateful.

“My dear Senator Mothma,” the Chancellor was saying when Obi-Wan drew her attention back to him, “I do appreciate this. I’m glad that you understand how dangerous this bill could be to the Republic if it advances.”

Senator Mothma made a noise of assent. “Thank you for coming, your Excellency, I know that you are a busy man –”

“Indeed, though I’m afraid I can’t stay –”

“Of course, I understand –”

Their voices overlapped each other, and Obi-Wan stopped paying attention to the words. She took another glass of wine from a passing droid, this time a pale pink Coruscant blush, and stood sipping at it slowly, watching the ebb and flow of people in the room. She could feel the Force curled quiescent at the back of her mind, mostly overwhelmed by the intense emotions of the guests. Obi-Wan could have sorted through it, but it wasn’t worth the trouble; the wine was keeping it at a bearable distance. It wasn’t, at this point, as if she needed the Force to make any of the politicians’ intentions clear to her; neither Mothma nor Padmé seemed to expect it.

Eventually the Chancellor departed, having made his approval for Senator Mothma clear, trailing Senator Viento and Master Kim in his wake. Obi-Wan murmured her farewells, fighting through the sudden flash of precognition as she turned towards them: Palpatine, his face wrinkled and twisted in a rictus of hatred; Viento, pleading for his life as a red lightsaber slashed down at him; Kim, his lightsaber falling from his hand as his body was riddled with dozens of blaster shots. Obi-Wan drew in a sharp breath, her hand closing so hard on the stem of the wineglass that it snapped. The images were gone as quickly as they had appeared, leaving her clutching the broken wineglass, blood starting to seep slowly from her palm.

“Obi-Wan?” Padmé said immediately, touching her elbow and drawing her aside behind a column. Bail and Mothma started towards them, then Bail thought better of it and steered Mothma away, leaving Obi-Wan and Padmé as alone as they could be in a crowded room. Padmé motioned a droid over to take the broken glass and produced a handkerchief, pressing it to Obi-Wan’s bloody hand. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

Obi-Wan looked down at the red soaking through the pale purple of Padmé’s handkerchief with a faint sense of disbelief. She made herself breathe in and out, a familiar quick meditative pattern that steadied her immediately, enough that she could retrieve her hand from Padmé’s blaster-callused grip. She took the handkerchief away and held her other hand out over her palm, gathering the Force around it. “It’s nothing,” she said, as the cuts closed up, skin knitting together over the wounds until there was nothing left except a few thin red lines. “Just – blast it, Quinlan was right. My precognition is spiking again.”

Padmé was staring at her healed hand, but she dragged her gaze back up to Obi-Wan’s face with a visible jerk. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Shadow on my grave,” Obi-Wan said, making herself smile at her. She snagged a flute of champagne from a server droid and drained it in one gulp. “It’s nothing, really. Don’t worry about me.”

“I do worry,” Padmé said, taking the ruined handkerchief from her and folding a cocktail napkin around it before putting it back into her reticule. “What else are friends for?”

“Backup?” Obi-Wan suggested, replacing the empty flute on the droid’s tray. It chirped at her, and she obediently took another glass, looking down at the faintly colored liquid.

Padmé shook her head. “You Jedi. Are you sure you’re all right? I’ve never seen you do that before.”

“I’m fine,” Obi-Wan said, casting her gaze over the rest of the room. Nobody appeared to have noticed that Senator Mothma’s Jedi guest had broken a glass and bloodied her hand over a vision. Well, most of them probably had other, more important things to be interested in.

Padmé gave her an uncertain look, hesitating, but she was stopped from saying anything more by the approach of Rush Clovis. The Banking Clan’s senator wound his way towards them, trailing several droids bearing plates of hors d’oeuvres. “Senator Amidala,” he said, pressing a kiss to her cheek, then, “Master Kenobi,” bowing over Obi-Wan’s hand. “I thought you might like something to eat.”

“How kind of you, Senator Clovis,” Padmé said, taking the proffered plate. She and Clovis immediately launched into a spirited discussion of the bill, which attracted the attention of a number of other senators and representatives who drifted over to weigh in.

Obi-Wan stood comfortably back and listened, nibbling at the hors d’oeuvres Clovis had brought them. Several times senators and representatives came up to her, wanting to know the Jedi’s views on the bill or merely curious to speak with a Jedi Knight for the first time. She’d done enough research that she could converse knowledgeably about the bill, using her experience from dozens of missions throughout the galaxy to discuss its repercussions on numerous worlds. There was something strangely enjoyable about it; Obi-Wan would never go so far as to say that she took pleasure in showing off, but it reminded her a little of logic classes at the Temple back when she’d been a padawan. She’d always been good at making connections that other padawans didn’t see.

Senators and representatives drifted in and out throughout the evening, while the mixed species band continued to play insipid music and failed to improve. Obi-Wan finished off several more glasses of wine and another plate of hors d’oeuvres, fending off the clumsy flirtations of several senators who were more interested in her breasts than her words or the lightsaber on her belt. There was nothing in the Jedi Code that forbade Jedi from having affairs outside the Order – so long as there was no attachment involved, at least – and there were a number of beings on Coruscant who practically fetishized Jedi. Obi-Wan had heard from Master Shaak Ti that Senator Tal Merrik of Kalevala kept a list of Jedi he had slept with and wasn’t surprised when he approached her, smiling and with a distinct mental overtone that he thought he was irresistible. Obi-Wan took the glass of wine he offered her but refused to leave with him, which he accepted with a smile and a shrug, chatting with her for a few minutes about the year-long mission she and Qui-Gon had been on in his home system almost ten years ago now.

A few minutes after he left her, Bail Organa came over, carrying two plates with an assortment of small cakes on them. He offered one to her. “I saw you talking with Senator Merrik,” he explained. “I thought you might like a rescue.”

“We have an acquaintance in common,” Obi-Wan explained. “Satine Kryze, the Duchess of Mandalore.” She smiled a little, digging a little silver fork into one of the cakes. “Senator Merrik’s not my type, anyway.”

Bail laughed a little, eating one of the little cakes in three bites. “How do you like your first taste of politics?”

“More when I pretend that these aren’t actually the people making policy for the entire Republic,” Obi-Wan said, canting her hip and shoulder against a column. “No offense meant, Senator.”

“None taken. I have the same feeling sometimes.” He forked up another bite of cake.

It was past midnight now, and most of the guests had already left, while the remaining few began to filter out as Mon Mothma’s droids and human servants made a pointed and concerted effort to clean up the evening’s detritus. Most of the Senate Guards had left with the guests, leaving only a few Blues behind to watch over the room until the remainder had gone. Mothma was talking with Merrik now, gesturing expansively with her free hand; the other one was holding a half-empty wineglass. Obi-Wan was glad to see that Padmé had finally gotten a chance to sit down; her laugh carrying across the room as Rush Clovis apparently said something clever.

Obi-Wan pointed at him with her fork. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Bail, but isn’t Senator Clovis part of the opposition?”

“You aren’t wrong,” Bail affirmed. “If you ask him, he’ll say he’s here to see how many votes he’s losing. Really he’s here to flirt with Senator Amidala and take notes on everyone who came, so he can send agents from the Banking Clan to remind certain senators that their planets are mortgaged to the hilt, so they ought to consider how attached they are to voting against the bill or else –” He made an expressive gesture with his fork, and Obi-Wan glanced across the room at Padmé and Clovis again. She hadn’t pegged Clovis for being that ruthless, but then again – one of the less pleasant in a litany of unpleasant truths about the Banking Clan was the amount of power they held in the galaxy.

Her comlink buzzed on her belt. Obi-Wan juggled her plate for a moment before she managed to unhook it. “This is Kenobi.”

“Master, it’s me,” Anakin said, with an undertone of worry Obi-Wan didn’t like. “Master Vos says you don’t have to come back, but the Temple’s gone on high alert; Master Ti’s padawan Fe Sun was murdered down in the city an hour ago.”

“What?” Obi-Wan said, passing her plate off to Bail as he held out his hand for it. She stepped away from him, into a quiet corner of the room behind a column. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Anakin said. “I haven’t been out of the Temple all evening. Nobody’s saying much, but Master Vos came by because he knew you weren’t going to be in the Temple tonight. Master Ti and some of the other knights are down in the city right now trying to find the murderer.”

“Do they know why?” Obi-Wan questioned, reaching out with her mind. From here she could touch Anakin’s anxiety and the aura of disquiet and fear that hung over the Jedi Temple, but she wasn’t skilled enough to reach down into the city and touch the minds of the Jedi that had searched, the murderer hiding themselves amongst the billions of beings on the city-planet’s surface. She drew her consciousness back, letting it settle inside the confines of her body.

There was a pause before her padawan’s reply, as presumably Anakin shook his head and then remembered Obi-Wan couldn’t see him. “No, Master. Master Ti and Fe Sun were on assignment down there, but I don’t know what they were doing; Fe Sun’s a lot younger than me.”

“Twelve,” Obi-Wan said, with a faint chill. All the wine she’d been drinking seemed to be burning off fast with the severity of the situation. “Fe Sun was twelve.”

“Was a lot younger than me,” Anakin corrected softly. “I – anyway, Master Vos said that you don’t have to come back immediately, because anyone who targets a padawan probably won’t go after a knight, and you’re with a bunch of senators, there’s probably nowhere safer to be, but –”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” Obi-Wan said, and heard his sigh of relief. “The party is finishing up anyway. Stay in the Temple until I get back.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice, Master,” Anakin said. “Skywalker out.”

Obi-Wan replaced the comlink on her belt and went back to Bail, who was eyeing her with concern. “That sounded like bad news.”

“Someone murdered a Jedi Padawan on assignment here on Coruscant,” Obi-Wan said.

His eyebrows shot up. “You go,” he said immediately. “I’ll explain to Mon and Padmé.”

“Thanks,” Obi-Wan said, starting towards the entrance. She stopped at the coat check to get her cloak from the protocol droid and was reaching for the door control when it opened in front of her and someone put a blaster in her face.

Tipsy from wine and champagne or not, her training took over. Obi-Wan slammed her left hand against the man’s grip on the blaster, shoving it sideways and down against his own body as she punched him in the neck with her free hand, hearing his choked-off gasp. In the next movement she’d taken the blaster away from him, leveling the weapon at him with both hands as he staggered away from her, holding his broken trigger finger.

“Stang!” he croaked, his gaze going to the lightsaber on her belt. “No one said there’d be a Jedi here!”

“You’re useless, sleemo!” snapped a woman from behind Obi-Wan, over the sound of someone’s hastily muffled scream.

Obi-Wan took a quick step sideways and back, kicking her dropped cloak out of the way as she put her back to the wall. The protocol droid from the coat check was wittering uselessly as Obi-Wan took in the situation, removing one hand from the blaster to unclip her lightsaber and ignite it. The warmth of the hilt was reassuring against her palm.

“Well,” she said, “that explains why the band was so bad.”

Only Bail Organa looked amused by the quip, though the faint twitch of his lips was the only sight he showed. He was still holding both plates, but he stood very still; two of the men who’d been passing as Mon Mothma’s servants had dropped their trays and pulled blasters from within their suit jackets, both barrels pointed at Bail’s head. The remainder of the false servants had done likewise, along with the band, so that the two remaining Senate Blues and the four Senators were completely surrounded, all of them held at blaster-point. Several of those blasters, including two rifles presumably pulled from the instrument cases, were pointed at Obi-Wan.

Mon Mothma had her hands spread out, open and empty, but her face was blazing with outrage. “What in blazes is this!” she demanded, her gaze focused on the blaster pointed at her face. Obi-Wan couldn’t sense any fear coming from her, though the room was soaked in it; Mothma seemed to be genuinely furious.

“Just a job, Senator,” said a Twi’lek female about Obi-Wan’s age, with a thin smile. She was holding a customized blaster, with a long narrow barrel and red stripes on the butt. Even in the bland bandmaster’s uniform she looked as deadly and dangerous as the quarra Obi-Wan had seen on Devaron, a vicious predator waiting for her chance to strike. Obi-Wan knew her type. Bounty hunter.

“I would advise,” Obi-Wan said coldly, putting a little compulsion behind it, though it wouldn’t have much effect on a group, “that you all rethink your life choices and leave.”

“Sorry, Jedi,” said the bounty hunter. “Can’t do that. Blasters down, boys,” she said to the Senate guards, who looked at each other uncertainly, then at the strangers. They were still holding their ceremonial blasters – as deadly and dangerous as the ones the bounty hunters had produced – but Obi-Wan could tell that they knew they were outnumbered and outgunned, even with a Jedi Knight on their side.

“Do it,” she said, more forcefully, “or I’ll start killing senators.”

“If you wanted to kill senators, you had more than enough chance before you revealed yourselves,” Obi-Wan said. Only Mothma, Bail, Padmé, and Clovis remained in the room. Padmé and Clovis, previously seated, had both stood up; Obi-Wan could tell that both of them were carrying weapons, though neither one made a move to reach for them. The Twi’lek, apparently the bounty hunter in charge, could apparently tell to; she gestured to one of her men, who patted both senators down roughly before removing one of Padmé’s elegant Naboo blasters and a small droid deactivator pistol from Clovis. The Weequay tucked the blaster into the back of his belt and tossed the deactivator aside, laughing. Clovis’s eyes flashed in anger. Obi-Wan shifted forward, onto the balls of her feet, and stopped when Padmé shook her head slightly. She wasn’t the only one that saw the gesture; the Twi’lek woman did too.

Out of the corner of her eye, Obi-Wan saw the bounty hunter she’d taken the blaster from produce a second weapon, but before he could do anything with it she flared the fingers of her left hand, still holding the blaster, and sent man and blaster flying backwards into the hallway, where his head hit the wall with a sickening crack. He slid limply to the floor and didn’t get up again.

The Twi’lek woman laughed. “Very impressive, Master Jedi. But if you try that trick again, I’ll have to start killing innocents – and we all know that you Jedi won’t stand for that, will you?”

“Whatever you’re being paid, I’ll double it,” Clovis insisted, flinching a little as the Twi’lek’s attention – and her blaster – swung around towards him. “I mean it! I represent the Banking Clan, anything you want –”

“Tempting, Senator,” said the Twi’lek. “But I’m afraid that I don’t break contracts. Come on, Blues,” she said to the Senate Guards, “put your blasters down.”

The two men looked at Senator Mothma, who must have been their principal, then at Obi-Wan. She could see the calculation in their eyes – whether or not two highly-trained Senate Guards, the best security force in the galaxy, and a Jedi Knight could defeat more than a dozen bounty hunters without harming any of the Senators. Obi-Wan tipped her head in acknowledgment, and they looked back at Mothma, both clearly unhappy and still calculating the odds.

If the original intention of the bounty hunters had been to harm the senators, they would already have done so. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t suddenly change their minds if the situation seemed to be going in a direction they didn’t like.

Senator Mothma had clearly had the same thought, because she nodded a little at the Guards. They looked unhappy, but they both knelt and put their blaster rifles down on the floor in front of them.

“Helmets too,” the Twi’lek ordered, and they obeyed before standing back up, bare hands upraised.

“What do you want?” Padmé demanded.

“Just a job, Senator Amidala,” said the woman again. She looked back at Obi-Wan, who hadn’t moved since her first threat. “What do you say, Master Jedi? Maybe I won’t do it – but some of my friends here aren’t as kind and gentle-hearted as I am. And I don’t really need all these senators alive.” She glanced around, then closed one purple hand around the back of Padmé’s dress and threw her to the ground, pressing her blaster to the back of her head.

Padmé didn’t scream, just breathed in once, very quickly and dug her fingers into the carpet, looking up at Obi-Wan. Clovis’s voice was rising in protest, Mothma’s and Bail’s as well, but Obi-Wan couldn’t make out any of the words.

“Or maybe I will pull the trigger,” said the Twi’lek cheerfully. “What do you say, Master Jedi?”

Obi-Wan reached out with the Force and knew instantly that she wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. She could stop the woman – but not the other bounty hunters, not all at once.

The Twi’lek’s finger tightened on the trigger.

“All right,” Obi-Wan said quickly, pressing the control for her lightsaber. She held it and the captured blaster up so that the bounty hunter could see them, then knelt and placed them slowly on the tile. She straightened back up with her empty hands still raised.

The Twi’lek bounty hunter smiled. “Jedi are so easy to deal with once you know what makes them tick. Good choice, Master Jedi,” she said in a conversational voice, then pointed the blaster at Obi-Wan and pulled the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fe Sun's murder is mentioned in Star Wars: Jedi - Shaak Ti, where it's implied but not outright stated that she could have been a knight rather than a padawan. Other characters in this chapter appear in both the Star Wars: Republic comics and the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series.


	5. Interlude: Anakin

Dawn light was beginning to filter in through the stained glass windows at the end of the hall as Anakin rapped on the door. He felt drained and exhausted, wrung out by the night’s events. News of Fe Sun’s murder had spread quickly through the Temple despite the Council’s attempts to keep it quiet; several distraught younglings that he knew from his classes had turned up at his doorstep just after he’d commed Obi-Wan and Anakin had found himself in the unlikely position of comforter, along with the other padawans whose masters had joined the search. He and Barriss Offee had only just convinced them to go back to the crèche, where the master in charge was dispensing soothing tisanes in bulk.

He knocked again, leaning his shoulder into the doorframe. The door slid open, revealing Quinlan Vos, who looked even worse than Anakin felt. He’d been out with the others looking for Fe Sun’s murderers, Anakin knew.

“Skywalker,” he said, squinting at Anakin. “What is it?”

“It’s Obi-Wan,” Anakin said, straightening up. “She didn’t come back last night. I commed her and told her about Fe Sun, and she said she was coming back immediately, but she never showed up. I’ve been comming her all night, but she’s not answering. And I’m having trouble sensing her in the Force.” He wiped his sweating hands on the edge of his tunic, resting the urge to chew his fingernails.

Vos blinked, then closed his eyes. Anakin felt him reaching out through the Force, his consciousness rolling past the confines of the Temple into the city. “Okay,” he said after a moment, shaking himself a little. “I see what you mean. I think she’s unconscious. Aayla!” he called over his shoulder. “Get your cloak. We’ve got a missing Jedi to find.”

Anakin let out his breath. “ _Thank_ you –”

Vos clapped his shoulder. “Thank me after we’ve brought her home. Where was she the last time you spoke to her? 500 Republica?”

Anakin nodded as Aayla emerged from the apartment, pulling her cloak on and carrying Vos’s. The three Jedi went down the hallway to the speeder bay as Anakin recounted everything he could remember about last night’s conversation. There wasn’t much to tell.

What he didn’t expect, when they made it to 500 Republic, was for Senator Mothma’s apartment to be crawling with Senate Guards. “Look, this isn’t Jedi business,” said the commander when she heard Vos arguing with a junior blue and made her way to the door.

“Yeah, it is,” Vos said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Master Obi-Wan Kenobi was here last night with the senators; she never made it back to the Temple and now she’s missing. Missing Jedi; Jedi business. So let us in.”

“You’ve got no proof that your Master Kenobi was even here when the incident occurred,” said the commander, matching him glare for glare. Anakin had to give her credit for being able to meet a Jedi Knight’s eyes for more than a few seconds, he supposed, looking around for some kind of evidence that Obi-Wan had been here. He could feel it in the Force, but he and Obi-Wan had dealt with enough law enforcement officials to know that most of them didn’t usually take a Jedi’s word as proof.

There was a pile of fallen cloth on the floor, half-hidden behind a decorative flowerpot. An analysis droid was carefully documenting it. “Excuse me,” Anakin said, going over to it.

“Don’t touch any of the evidence!” the Guard commander barked, storming past Vos after him as Anakin picked it up. “Put that down –”

Anakin did not. Instead he fought back his sudden wash of nerves to say, “This is a Jedi cloak. This is Obi-Wan’s cloak; I watched her put it on last night.”

The commander eyed him suspiciously. “Could be anybody’s.”

Vos reached around and took the pile of heavy brown fabric out of Anakin’s hands, to the commander’s obvious dismay. “Padawan Skywalker is right,” he said. “This belongs to Master Kenobi. I advise that you tell us what’s going on, Commander. We find our Jedi, you find your senators, everyone goes home happy except the bad guys.”

Aayla had followed him over. “We’ll stay out of your way as best we can, Commander,” she said. “We just want to find our missing Jedi, and if we can help with the search for the senators as well –”

The commander gave her a deeply unimpressed look. “I don’t hold with Jedi,” she remarked.

They never did, Anakin thought, balling his hands into fists and trying to imagine what Obi-Wan might have said to get the situation under control. She was usually good at things like this. Except she wasn’t here, which was the whole problem –

“Besides,” Vos went on coaxingly, “you want me especially here. I’m a Kiffar as well as a Jedi; I have the ability to read images, sense memories, whatever you want to call it, off objects. And I can’t tell you what – who – made Obi-Wan drop her cloak.”

The commander hesitated a moment more, then nodded. “Useful trick, that,” she said. “If it works.”

Vos winced a little. “Trust me,” he said, “it works.”

She nodded, then yelled over her shoulder, “Sagoro! Get an analysis droid over here to do a sketch.” She turned back to them. “I’m Commander Zalin Bey.”

“Master Quinlan Vos. This is my padawan Aayla Secura and Master Kenobi’s padawan Anakin Skywalker.” He tapped a finger against the bundle of fabric he was holding. “She wasn’t wearing this during the party, so there isn’t much I can tell you about that. She picked it up from the coat check, was carrying it when she got to the door, and then was surprised by a human man with a blaster on the other side – I can describe him for you, if you want. Obi-Wan disarmed him, then dropped her cloak and kicked it aside – probably so she could get her lightsaber out. The guy with the blaster wasn’t expecting her – he said, ‘No one said there’d be a Jedi here.’”

Commander Bey’s eyebrows went up. “All that from a piece of cloth?” she said, sounding reluctantly impressed as an analysis droid trundled up along with another Senate Guard. Vos went off with them while Aayla and Anakin looked at each other.

“Jedi are good for something, huh?”

“Psychometry’s a Kiffar talent, not a Jedi one,” Aayla muttered at him. “Can we come in and look around?”

“Try not to touch anything,” Bey said, stepping back. “Security cameras were tampered with and started running a loop about ten minutes after midnight to half past. None of the Blues in the rest of the building saw anything or heard shooting, but the room would have muffled that.”

“That’s when I commed Obi-Wan,” Anakin said as he and Aayla followed her inside. “She said she was going to leave as soon as she could, but she never came home –”

“So we’ve got about a twenty minute window,” Bey said thoughtfully.

Something reddish-brown on the floor by the door caught Anakin’s eye, and he bent down to peer at it, reaching out before he remembered Bey’s order and pulled his hand back. “This is blood ¬–”

“I figure someone got a few good knocks in before they were overpowered,” Bey said. She glanced down at the datapad she was carrying. “We ran a genetic test, but it came back to a coded ID. Not a Senator or a Blue; we have access to those.”

“Let me try,” Aayla said, taking it from her and punching in her Jedi ID. “Genetic match comes up as Master Kenobi’s blood; genetic results on Jedi aren’t available to anyone outside the Order,” she added to Bey, sounding rather lofty.

Anakin looked down at the blood, feeling slightly ill. There was a patch of it on the floor about the size of his hand, with several plain hairpins and a few strands of red hair stuck in it; Obi-Wan must have hit her head pretty hard going down. But there wasn’t enough blood for it to be fatal. He picked up a pin, dried blood flaking off on his fingers, and went to find Master Vos, who was waiting for the analysis droid to finish rendering his description of Obi-Wan’s attacker into a sketch.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to him.

Vos raised an eyebrow at him. “It’s a hairpin.”

“It’s Obi-Wan’s. There’s a place on the floor with dried blood on it; I think Obi-Wan hit her head.” He kept holding the pin out, and after a moment Vos took it. Aayla and Commander Bey came up behind them, waiting for Vos to do his psychometry thing.

The Jedi Master took the pin, turning it over in his fingers. “It’s Obi-Wan’s, all right,” he said. His eyes went a little unfocused. “Okay – she put her hair up, she went to 500 Republic to meet Senator Amidala, they came here, talked with a lot of politicals – huh, Master Kim was here with the Chancellor –”

“I know him,” Anakin put in. “Do you think he was taken too?”

“No, he left – talked with more politicals, drank, ate, talked – she’s on the comm with you now, she’s leaving – okay, here’s our shooter, Obi-Wan takes him out, and – room full of bounty hunters, lovely. Guards are down. Obi-Wan puts her lightsaber down because the lead bounty hunter’s threatening to shoot the hostages, and then –” He stopped.

“What?” Anakin demanded.

“The bounty hunter shot her,” Vos said reluctantly.

Every light in the room exploded in a shower of broken glass.

“Skywalker!” Vos yelled all the Senate Guards went for their weapons. Even Aayla’s lightsaber had flown to her hand, though at least she hadn’t ignited it.

Anakin clapped a hand to his mouth, trying to get himself under control. He could feel the Force ringing with the strength of his emotions, overwhelming everything else around him; anything not nailed down in the room, including the droids, started to rise an inch or so off the floor, wobbling slightly. _Stop_ , he thought, panicked, _stop that!_

But he couldn’t seem to think past _He shot her. The bounty hunter shot Obi-Wan._

Vos stepped forward amidst the swirling Force-waves of chaos and jangling emotion and grabbed his forearms. The touch dragged Anakin back into himself and he stared at the Jedi Master amidst the broken glass that was still hanging in the air around them. “Skywalker, get hold of yourself,” he snapped. Anakin could sense him trying to radiate calm, but it couldn’t seem to penetrate the barrier he’d thrown up around himself – or, well, no, not a barrier, just a bramble-like tangle of rage and terror that withstood all attempts to tear it down. “Remember that you are a Jedi. What would Obi-Wan say?”

_Remember that you are a Jedi._

“But she’s all right!” Anakin heard himself say. “She has to be all right – I’d know if she was – if she was – wouldn’t I? I’d know!”

When he and Obi-Wan had first become Padawan and Master, their bond had been the weakest the Council had ever seen. Anakin wouldn’t have been able to touch Obi-Wan’s mind if either of their lives depended on it and at the time he hadn’t particularly wanted to. Through some quirk of the Force their bond had eventually strengthened, to the extent that sometimes Anakin found himself sliding into Obi-Wan’s thoughts without meaning to. But not now. Now he could barely feel her, wasn’t even sure if he _could_ feel her or if it was just his imagination. _But I’d know_ , he thought, desperately, and could remember when he wouldn’t have known if Obi-Wan was dead or dying or just extremely annoyed.

Vos shook him a little. “You’d know,” he said. “Skywalker, listen to me. You’re her Padawan. If she was dead, or even badly injured, you’d know it. Both of us would. The Force would tell us.”

The shattered glass of the broken lights crashed down around them, along with everything else Anakin had levitated. “But Fe Sun –”

“Fe Sun was neither a knight nor bound to you,” Vos said. “Trust me, Skywalker! At most Obi-Wan’s unconscious or injured; that shot was probably a stun blast. There would be more damage left behind if it was anything else, and no bounty hunter in the galaxy can clean up the psychic residue that results from killing a Jedi Knight, especially one of Obi-Wan’s power. Don’t let your emotions rule you when you know better.”

“Then why can’t I sense her?” Anakin managed to ask. His hands were starting to shake.

“Because your emotions are too great for you to concentrate,” Vos said immediately. “Calm your mind and clear your heart and you’ll be able to sense her, even with the disturbance in the Force from Fe Sun’s murder. You know it to be true.”

“But –” Anakin started, and then one or another of Obi-Wan’s lessons finally kicked in and he bit his lip, stopping the words before they came spilling out.

Vos released him, holding his gaze the entire time. Anakin could, after a fashion, feel the Force between them, dizzied and confused despite the waves of calm Vos was trying to project.

“Master Vos,” said Commander Bey, her hand still on her sidearm. “Get him off my crime scene.”

“Aayla,” Vos said, still not looking away from him, “why don’t you and Padawan Skywalker go and have a look around outside, see if you can work out which way the attackers went?”

“Yes, Master,” Aayla said, approaching Anakin cautiously. Her blue fingers touched lightly on his elbow as she drew him away, and Anakin squeezed his eyes shut, finally breaking Vos’s gaze. It all felt – not better, but more distant. Anakin looked around the room just before the doors closed behind him and thought, with sudden, heartbreakingly clear relief, _I didn’t hurt anyone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Senate Guard characters who appear in this chapter are from the _Star Wars: Honor and Duty_ TPB ( _Star Wars: Republic_ #46-48 and #78).


	6. Chapter 6

Obi-Wan woke up, eventually, to a blistering headache and a feeling that something was horribly, terribly wrong.

It took her a moment to work out whether that was her own common sense or the Force trying to tell her something. She could feel Anakin’s overwhelming panic pounding in her brain, threatening to overwhelm her own mind. _But Anakin wasn’t at the party_ , she thought hazily, and kept her eyes shut while she let that percolate into something resembling the truth. Anakin’s worry was familiar; over the past six years, after their Master-Padawan bond had stabilized, Obi-Wan had gotten so used to it that she thought it would be more notable for its absence than its presence. But this time it was a bit stronger than usual, and it took Obi-Wan several minutes to work the tendrils of his panic out from her own mind, until she could think clearly again. Once that was done, she let her senses roll outwards, thinking firmly of Padmé and the other senators that had still been at the party when the bounty hunters had arrived. The walls of the building that she was being held in were transparent in her mind, bits of mist that meant nothing to the Force. Obi-Wan passed through them as if they weren’t even there, watching her mental tracks so that she could recognize them in the waking world.

Her sense of Padmé in the Force was like the winter rains on Naboo, fierce and deadly, but beautiful in their own way too, cleansing and purifying. Bail Organa was polished durasteel, like the hull of a warship, with a sense of banked coals and a flicker of flame at his heart. She was less familiar with Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, but she could feel them too, upright in the Force, each with their own personality marker. Her sense of the four senators wasn’t as strong as it would have been had they been Jedi, but it didn’t need to be: all Obi-Wan needed to know was that they were alive. She could sense other beings within the vicinity, vaguely familiar from the party: the bounty hunters that had attacked them. Beyond that, the vast city-planet of Coruscant roiled, so many minds that opening herself up to them would drive even a Jedi Knight mad. No Jedi that she could reach, just Anakin’s steadily increasing panic in the back of her head, and he was too distant and distracted to respond to her mental calls.

They’d have to work on that when she got back to the Temple, Obi-Wan thought, and dropped out of her own head and back into her body.

Her extended Force use had mostly wiped the headache away, but Obi-Wan realized almost immediately that her arms aches, her shoulders twisted in a way that was mostly definitely not natural, and that there was an unwelcome familiar pressure on her wrists.

Oh, not _again_.

Obi-Wan opened her eyes, blinking in the dimness of the room. She let the Force roll out again, using it the way a bat would use sound: directing the Force-waves to spread out and bounce back, telling her the shape of the room. It was big, probably part of an old warehouse, with loading doors at one end and a second, smaller door at the other, directly across from Obi-Wan. Stretched across half the room was a chain-link fence; Obi-Wan was handcuffed and chained to the top of it, her arms stretched out over her head. Her toes just barely touched the floor, enough that the strain on her arms and shoulders wasn’t completely unbearable.

Obi-Wan flexed her feet gently, trying to see how much give she had, then her wrists, letting the Force flow into the joints to ease the ache. Her current position would have been a major impediment for anyone but a Jedi – and even some of them – but the memory of her captivity on Derith Nahar had gnawed at her since her return to Coruscant. She’d be damned if she’d let it happen again.

Tensing her arms, she wrapped her fingers around the chain on the binders and _pulled_ , pushing herself up off the ground with her toes at the same time. A touch of the Force sent her catapulting upward, landing flatfooted on the top of the chain-link fence. It swayed alarmingly under her weight, but it was made of stronger stuff than it seemed and stabilized after a moment. Obi-Wan stayed crouching, studying the binders that bound her to the fence. Padmé probably had lock picks on her somewhere, she thought ruefully, but the closest that Obi-Wan came to that was –

Hmm.

Tipping forward to try and reach her remaining hairpins made the fence sway again and Obi-Wan nearly lose her balance. She bit her lip hard enough to hurt and shut her eyes, focusing on the hairpins that she could feel pressing against her skull, having shifted from their former position sometime since the party. Some of her hair had fallen out of its former tight twists, lank against her shoulders, but enough of it remained in position that she was certain she could at least manage two hairpins.

With her eyes shut, she could see – for lack of a better word – the Force that pressed close around her. Obi-Wan tugged lightly at it with her mind, flicking her fingers as she drew the hairpins from her hair. Several more twists of her hair fell against her face, but Obi-Wan barely noticed. Opening her eyes, she saw the hairpins hanging in the air in front of her face and sent them on a slow descent until she could grasp them in both hands.

Obi-Wan let the Force release with a sigh and found the lock on the binders. She picked it by touch, made a little clumsy by using hairpins instead of proper picks, and huffed out a soft breath of relief as she felt it click open. The Force caught the binders as they started to fall, floating them back up to her, and Obi-Wan plucked them out of the air. She looped them through her belt; there was no knowing when a pair of binders would come in handy, especially on a day like this.

She dropped lightly down to the permacrete floor, jarring loose another hair twist. Obi-Wan hadn’t exactly done her hair with the intention of fighting in it and while it would have held under normal circumstances, whatever had happened over the past few hours was clearly too much for it. Irritated, she snapped out a hand just to the side of her head, feeling all her remaining hairpins go flying into it. The heavy weight of her long red hair came down all at once; Obi-Wan poured the hairpins into one of her belt-pouches and reached back with both hands to pull her hair into a quick braid the thickness of her wrist, binding it off with a spare hair-tie. Obi-Wan kept her hair long out of un-Jedi-like vanity, as she was self-aware enough to know that it would be more practical cut short, but that didn’t mean she went anywhere without at least a dozen hair-ties in case of situations like this.

She could feel the lump on the back of her head as she pulled at her hair, dried blood flaking off on her fingers. No wonder that she had had a headache when she’d woken up; she must have gone down hard when the stun blast hit her. A blood trail might be a good thing, if the bounty hunters hadn’t been smart enough to clean it up afterwards. Without sunlight – which was a rare thing to come by in some of the worse levels on Coruscant anyway – it was hard to tell how much time had passed, but it had to be at least long enough that the senatorial vote might have started. Not all senators showed up, even for the preliminary votes, so the absence of four might not be missed. The absence of one Jedi might not be missed either, even in the midst of a manhunt for a Jedi killer – except that Obi-Wan had left behind an extremely panic-prone Padawan who had been expecting her home. When she didn’t show up, Anakin would have gone looking for her. After six years, Obi-Wan knew Anakin better than most beings would ever know themselves. He would come and try to find her, and if he found evidence of a fight, then he’d – 

_Panic_ , Obi-Wan thought grimly. But after that – or along with that – he’d do what needed to be done. They’d talked about this just a few days ago.

She put her hand to her belt to see if her comlink was there, but of course the bounty hunters had taken that from her along with her lightsaber. Obi-Wan, like Qui-Gon before her, wasn’t the type of Jedi to carry more than a few basic necessities on her at all times; more on away missions, but for an evening out all she had had were her lightsaber and her comlink. She was rather regretting that now.

She stepped forwards towards the nearer door, swiping her hand experimentally over the control. To her surprise it wasn’t even locked, the motion detector flaring briefly amber as the door slid open, creaking. Obi-Wan stepped warily out into the dingy hallway, which was lit by a few flickering chemical lights. There was no one in sight, but she could hear voices coming from the far end of the hallway. She hesitated for a moment, listening to the Force, which told her that Padmé and the other senators were in the opposite direction and a floor above her. There seemed to be several guards with them, which was to be expected. Obi-Wan would deal with that when the time came.

The senators would keep. Obi-Wan turned in the direction of the voices.

She kept to the wall, her hands clenched into fists at her sides, feeling out her way with the Force as she went. A blinking light near the ceiling caught her attention; Obi-Wan flicked her fingers at the security camera, making sure that it didn’t register her passage. Belatedly, she realized that she had forgotten to look for cams back in the loading bay where she had been kept, but if the bounty hunters had noticed her disappearance she would have expected more alarm. As far as they were concerned, she was still out cold.

She passed several other doors in the hallway, but there were no living beings behind them. Obi-Wan stopped in front of one and touched a finger to the control, watching the door swish open. Inside, the room was unused and dusty, a ragged blanket and several empty bottles in one corner where some vagrant must have crashed once upon a time. Broken glass littered the ground in front of a partially-boarded up window. Obi-Wan went over the window and stood up on tip-toe to peer out, hoping that it looked outwards and might give her some idea of where on – or _in_ – Coruscant she was.

No matter how bright the day, sunlight never penetrated the deepest levels of Coruscant. Obi-Wan found herself looking out at once of the city-planet’s many tunnel-like streets, somewhere far from the surface where the Senate and the Jedi Temple were located. Outside the world fell into shadows, penetrated by the few chemlamps that hadn’t been broken and a neon sign of a mostly unclothed Twi’lek woman down the street that blinked from pink to green to blue as Obi-Wan watched. The buildings – if they could be called that, blocky metal or permacrete structures that had seen better days – were all closed up and anonymous. No speeders passed by; the usual noise of the city was muted, lingering in the distance as a dull roar. The only beings in sight were a tough-looking Whiphid thug who disappeared into the building with the neon sign and a skinny Nautolan curled up in front of a boarded-up door, sucking eagerly at something in a brown paper bag. It could have been any of a thousand streets in Coruscant.

Obi-Wan lowered herself back down to the floor and turned even before the Farghul behind her could finish saying, “Hey, what are you – stang! It’s that Jedi bitch!”

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to call names?” Obi-Wan chided, but she was already moving, flinging herself forward into a run. She bounced off the floor, legs coming up to scissor tight around the felinoid’s neck as she slammed him down. His head hit the permacrete floor with a deafening _crack_ , blood pooling out around his skull as Obi-Wan flipped back to her feet. His Twi’lek companion barely had time to get a syllable of protest out before Obi-Wan whipped her right foot into his jaw. There was a satisfying crunch of breaking bone as he crumpled to the floor next to his friend, out cold.

Obi-Wan reached down and removed the matched pair of blasters from his belt. She didn’t like blasters, never had, but like most Jedi she knew how to use one and unlike most Jedi she practiced regularly at the range in the Temple. She checked the charge cartridges quickly – full and clean, just like any good bounty hunter – and flipped the setting from _kill_ to _stun_. Hopefully if she had to shoot someone, it would be someone who could give the Senate Guard answers.

Blasters in hand, she stepped back out into the hallway. Jedi themselves were living weapons, the most dangerous beings in the galaxy despite their technical status as peacekeepers, but there was something comforting about having a weapon in hand, even if it wasn’t her lightsaber.

Obi-Wan frowned at the thought. Jedi weren’t supposed to think such things.

She paused for a moment to mentally prod at her connection to Anakin and staggered, catching herself on the wall with one hand. If anything, Anakin’s panic had increased since the last time Obi-Wan had attempted to touch her mind. For a moment she had been in serious danger of getting sucked into his Force-presence, overwhelming her own mind and leaving her body a blank shell on the floor of the warehouse. If she was certain that Anakin would have noticed, then she might have risked it to ensure the senators’ safety, but she knew her Padawan well enough to guess that even consuming her mind would have bypassed him entirely in his current state of frenzy. There was a reason that Jedi were cautioned against fear and anger as well as forbidden attachments; not merely because it distracted from their sense of duty, but because it could dangerously hamper their ability to use the Force effectively.

_Anakin, Anakin, Anakin, no –_

Obi-Wan slammed down a mental barrier between the two of them, which restricted the Master-Padawan bond between to nothing more than an agonizing itch in the back of her head, like a bug bite that she couldn’t quite scratch. She could only hope that Anakin might eventually notice that and realize that something was wrong besides merely the fact that she was missing. She didn’t feel terribly sanguine on the subject, however.

_Anakin, when I get back we’re going to have a serious talk about not letting your emotions affect your ability to do your duty,_ Obi-Wan thought grimly.

She straightened up, frowning as she felt wetness on her upper lip, and wiped a trickle of blood away from her nose with the back of her hand. Master-Padawan bond or not, if Anakin’s distress was affecting her this much from halfway across the planet, there was something seriously wrong. The last time he had managed this they’d been in the same room as each other, though in considerably more dire circumstances.

Fortunately none of the other bounty hunters had entered the hallway during her few minutes of incapacity. Obi-Wan proceeded down the corridor blasters first, heading towards the door marked FOREMAN, from which she could hear the voice of the Twi’lek woman who had shot her. From the tinny quality of the response, Obi-Wan guessed that she was talking to a hologram. A twist of the Force brought the voices to her ear as she lingered hidden behind a corner.

_“– release the senators in three hours time. I doubt that they will be able to find their way back to the Senate before nightfall today, if that.”_

“Yes, my lord. What about the Jedi? Lot of street cred for topping one of them, especially right now –”

_“Give Master Kenobi to me,”_ the stranger interrupted. Obi-Wan frowned. There was something familiar about his voice, but she couldn’t seem to place it.

“That’ll cost you.”

_“Name your price.”_

The Twi’lek named a number that made Obi-Wan’s eyebrows rise towards her hairline. She knew that captive Jedi, rare as they were, could sell for a lot on the open market, but this seemed excessive.

All the stranger said, however, was, _“Very well. I’ll transmit coordinates to you.”_

“Soon,” snapped the bounty hunter. “I want her out of here before she wakes up.”

There was no reply, the hologram apparently having disconnected. A moment later the door swung open and the Twi’lek woman emerged, no longer clothed in her bandsman’s uniform. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber hung from her belt alongside her holstered blaster. Scowling in distaste, Obi-Wan pressed herself back against the wall, counting the breaths until the Force told her that the woman had gone.

She darted forwards across the hallway, waving a hand over the door’s motion sensor and pushing slightly with the Force when it didn’t slide open, tricking the electronic lock into opening for her.

There wasn’t much to see inside the room. Obi-Wan slipped one of her stolen blasters through her belt and tapped a finger against the miniature holocomm that had been left on the desk, hoping that it was an open channel so that she could get through to the Jedi Temple. But there was only one dial available, and her attempt to program in the Temple dial resulted in a series of error messages. A burner holocomm, as they called it on the street.

Obi-Wan hesitated, then shrugged and called the only available dial. Bounty hunters didn’t work without being paid; someone was behind the kidnapping of the senators, someone that the Twi’lek woman had called “my lord.”

There was a moment of blue static before the holocomm began to transmit, then it steadied into a tall humanoid figure, features concealed by the hood it wore. Obi-Wan drew in a sharp breath, clutching at the edge of the table to steady herself, the remaining blaster skidding across the top as she dropped it. Perhaps alone of all the Jedi in the Order, Obi-Wan was aware of the strength of the Dark Side, of the way it felt in her mind, in her bones, the tremors it sent along the Force. Other Jedi had touched it, glanced at it, but only Obi-Wan had looked in the abyss of a Sith Lord and lived to tell of it. She knew what a Sith Lord looked like when she saw one – even through a hologram.

“Who _are_ you?” she rasped out through clenched teeth, making herself straighten up through sheer force of will. She was a Jedi Knight, the only living Jedi Knight to ever slay a Sith Lord in combat, and she would be damned if she showed weakness to another.

“Master Kenobi!” said the Sith Lord, sounding pleased. Sith hells damn it, Obi-Wan was positive that she had heard his voice before, but she didn’t know where. She had spoken to so many beings in her life. “What a delight it is to see you unharmed. I see that our dear Bey’aaan was right to fear your escape, although she seems to have mistimed it somewhat. It’s a pity; I was so hoping that you would be my guest for a few days, but I suppose that seems unlikely now.”

“Who are you?” Obi-Wan demanded. “What do you want with the senators?”

“Surely you can’t blame me for having an interest in the inner workings of the Senate, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord. “After all, it’s my Republic too. I owe it to my planet to ensure that the Senate has only the best intentions for the Republic.”

“The Planetary Sovereignty Bill?” Obi-Wan said. “You want it to pass.”

He made a tutting sound. “Now, now, Master Kenobi, let’s not get hung up on specifics, shall we?”

“And what do you want with me?” Obi-Wan said. “Revenge for Darth Maul?”

“My predecessor was little better than an animal. I ought to thank you for killing him, Master Kenobi. Do you know what some beings say about the Jedi?”

“Enlighten me,” Obi-Wan said. Her hands were white-knuckled on the edge of the table, the metal edge digging into her palms hard enough to leave marks.

“They say that the Jedi are the right hand of the Force,” said the Sith Lord, “and the Sith are the left. Or, well, they don’t say that exactly since that species doesn’t have what we think of as hands and it doesn’t quite translate properly into Basic, but you get the idea. Balance, my dear. The Force is all about balance. Where there are Jedi, there are Sith. Where there are Sith, there are Jedi. I give you a riddle, Master Kenobi: a Sith Lord and a Jedi Knight fell that day on Naboo. An apprentice became a master and a master became an apprentice. Maul died and I sprang into being.”

“There is more than one Sith Lord,” Obi-Wan said slowly, fear settling into certainty. She’d argued the matter with the Jedi Council on and off for the past six years, convinced that Maul hadn’t been working alone despite the Council’s doubt that he’d been anything besides a lone Dark Jedi. But Obi-Wan _knew_ what he had been, deep in her bones. She hadn’t wanted to believe what the Force had kept telling her. She’d wanted to believe it was over. But she knew better. She knew it, and the Force knew it. “Why are you telling me this?”

“You know why I’m telling you, Master Kenobi. You know what I want from you.” The Sith Lord smiled beneath his hood.

“No,” Obi-Wan said flatly. “I don’t.”

The door behind her opened and Obi-Wan spun on her heel. Instinct and training took over; she flung her hands up, the Force flowing through them, and sent the Rodian flying sideways into the doorframe. He crumpled to the floor, winking out of the Force as he passed out.

“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord.

Obi-Wan turned back to him. She could feel movement in the Force; there was something coming towards the building, maybe a klick away now. But the Dark Side flowed around her, masking her usual senses so that she had no idea what they meant. With any luck, the Senate Guard had worked out where they were. Hopefully Anakin was with them and not back at the Temple causing more distress than her disappearance merited. Normally Obi-Wan would be able to tell, but she didn’t dare open up the Master-Padawan bond again. Anakin’s mind would eat hers whole.

“I am a Jedi, like my master before me,” she said. “The Jedi will crush the Sith, as we have always crushed them before. Think on that, _my lord_.” She flicked a finger at the holocomm, turning it off, and the Sith’s image flickered out of existence. He was still smiling beneath his hood as he vanished.

Obi-Wan went over to the door, stepping carefully over the unconscious Rodian, and peered out into the corridor. Reassured that no one was coming, she leaned down and grasped the Rodian by his arms, pulling him into the office and out of sight. She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose in distaste; Rodian body odor, unless masked by perfumes or colognes, was offensive to humans, and this one apparently hadn’t bathed in the last month or so. Obi-Wan had been in garbage pits that smelt better than he did. He couldn’t have been at the party last night or every senator in 500 Republica would have known that something was amiss.

She picked the burner holocomm up off the table and slipped it into one of her belt-pouches. When she got back to the Temple, she’d have Anakin or one of the tech analysis droids trace the signal. If the Sith Lord was still on Coruscant, then she would find him. And she’d kill him.

_Sith Lords are our specialty_ , she heard, a whisper in the Force from some unknown past or future. She couldn’t tell who had said it, her or Anakin or someone else entirely, or when.

Obi-Wan pushed the thought away. Either her precog was spiking again or the Force had decided to add retrocognition to her otherwise mostly useless bag of tricks, but there was nothing she could do about it now.

There wasn’t much else in the office except for the table and a few cupboards, but Obi-Wan went through it anyway, hoping to find her comlink or some evidence of who the Sith Lord was. The cupboard proved to be bare aside from a long-forgotten candy bar wrapped and a half-empty case of blaster charges that didn’t fit her stolen blasters; Obi-Wan left them where she found them.

She reached out with the Force, meaning to check that Padmé and the other senators remained unharmed, and found Anakin.

Obi-Wan tipped her head curiously to one side, barely aware that she was doing so. Even with the Master-Padawan bond narrowed to its thinnest width she could feel Anakin fretting through the Force, eclipsing every other presence in his immediate vicinity. Obi-Wan could just barely sense two other Jedi with him; she was familiar enough with Quinlan’s markers in the Force to identify him, which meant that it was almost certainly Aayla with him. The others were just shadows in the Force, although Obi-Wan guessed they were Senate Guard. Somebody had unquestionably done very good police work to find them so quickly, she thought distractedly; it almost certainly wasn’t Anakin.

Obi-Wan could have waited for them to arrive, but the Force had left her with no sense of the distance between them. And Obi-Wan had never been good at waiting anyway, especially when it came to waiting to be rescued by her panicking Padawan. If she didn’t want to listen to Anakin gloating for the next month, she had to rescue the senators and capture the bounty hunters herself.

She picked up the blaster she had dropped on the table, checked the charge again as she had been taught, and stepped out into the corridor.

The silence surprised her. It was never quiet on Coruscant, not completely; even in the deepest meditation chambers at the Temple Obi-Wan had occasionally found herself startled out of a trance by some outside noise. This warehouse wasn’t nearly so quiet as the meditation chambers, which had been built to filter out sound, but even – especially – this deep in the lower levels of Coruscant Obi-Wan expected more background noise. The street outside had been nearly empty; Obi-Wan didn’t have enough experience working on Coruscant to know if that was normal or not. She and Anakin had done all of their assignments off-planet, just as she and Qui-Gon had done; they weren’t the kind of Jedi who functioned exclusively on Coruscant.

Taking a breath, Obi-Wan began to move quickly through the hallway, glancing up from time to time to make sure that she didn’t miss any security cameras. Whenever she spotted one, she reached out with the Force, rubbing out the evidence of her passage from the cam’s digital memory. She kept the transparent mental blueprint of the warehouse that she had constructed earlier at the forefront of her mind, letting the Force guide her passage.

The warehouse struck her as small for its intended purpose. Sense memories of the products that had passed through these halls in the past remained, making Obi-Wan frown in disgust – alcohol and spice and other unsavory things. For now, though, it seemed to be sitting empty aside from the senators and their captors. The security cams looked like they had been installed within the past decade, much newer than the rest of the building. Probably not installed just to keep an eye on four senators and one Jedi Knight – they weren’t _that_ new – but it implied that the building hadn’t just been sitting empty until the bounty hunters strolled in. If they had rented it, then that might have left a paper trail that the Senate Guard could follow.

Obi-Wan found herself standing between a packing elevator and the door to a stairwell. She took one hand off the blaster grip to activate the motion sensor, watching the door slide creakily open. Up or down, she thought, standing on the landing. Down would lead her to street level, up to what passed for the roof this deep in Coruscant. Obi-Wan reached outwards with the Force, searching for Padmé’s familiar bright spark.

Up, then.

She checked the blaster’s charge pack again, more out of nerves than anything else – it wasn’t as though she had shot anyone since the last time she had checked – and began to climb the stairs. Her Jedi boots echoed hollowly in the empty stairwell, but the dust on the steps and the lack of it on the elevator door suggested that no one had used the stairs in a long time. Still, Obi-Wan kept her mind as open as she dared with Anakin’s panic still gnawing at the edges of it. She wanted to know if there was anyone approaching, but she could tell that her attention was badly divided because of the need to keep Anakin’s mind out of hers. She didn’t dare close herself out of the Force entirely – she had trained Forceblind as a Padawan, as all Jedi did, but hadn’t had to use that training in years. And she didn’t dare shut herself off from the Force with a Sith Lord about. He wasn’t _here_ , Obi-Wan was nearly certain of that, but still the Dark Side seemed to hang about her, a stagnant miasma that threatened to take her back to Naboo.

Obi-Wan would almost rather let Anakin’s mind consume hers than go back there, only she knew that her Padawan would never be able to live with the guilt.

As she climbed the stairs, the indistinct sense of several beings in the Force settled out into discrete individuals. Obi-Wan identified Padmé and Bail Organa from memory, and then, less certainly, Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, which left three strangers. Guards, presumably. Even counting the three men she had incapacitated earlier and the Twi’lek woman, that left at least half a dozen other bounty hunters unaccounted for. It was a large number; most bounty hunters that Obi-Wan had met seldom worked in groups much larger than two or three, if that. The Twi’lek woman – Bey’aaan, the Sith Lord had called her, which didn’t ring any bells in Obi-Wan’s memory – must have assembled them all individually or in pairs, since the majority seemed to be different races.

She stopped on the next landing, using the Force to open the door no wider than necessarily to look out. Up here, the corridor was narrow and dark – the built-in chemlamps didn’t seem to be working, but someone had strung flicker-lights along the walls, illuminating the space with changing flashes of blue, green, and purple light. Numerous doors were spaced at irregular intervals on either side of the hallway; a dormitory, perhaps. The three bounty hunters were sitting on the floor in the rough center of the hallway, playing cards over a glittering pile between them. Padmé’s and Mon Mothma’s jewelry, along with whatever else Bail and Clovis had been wearing that could be fenced on the open market.

Obi-Wan took a deep breath, flicked the door the rest of the way open, and came out shooting.

She might not like blasters, but she knew how to use one; she didn’t even have to reach for the Force to help her the way some Jedi would have had to. Three shots and all three bounty hunters were sprawled on the floor, stunned. They hadn’t even had time to reach for their own weapons.

There was a thump against one of the closed doors. “Obi-Wan!” Padmé shouted. “Master Kenobi! Is that you?”

“It’s me,” Obi-Wan said, stepping towards the door. It was locked, but she held her hand out over the control panel, pushing at it with the Force until it clicked open, the door sliding back. Padmé emerged from the shadows within – the room was lit only by a single bare bulb – and gave the unconscious bounty hunters a dismissive book.

“Are you all right?” she asked, peering at Obi-Wan with concern. “You were bleeding when they took you away.”

“Just a knock on the head,” Obi-Wan said, removing the second blaster from her belt and handing it over. Padmé took it, her eyes lighting up.

There was another thump. “Hey!” Rush Clovis shouted. “Is someone out there? Let us out!”

“Bail and Mon are here somewhere too,” Padmé explained, checking the charge on the blaster. “It would be rude to leave Rush here all on his own.”

Obi-Wan sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

She could check each door individually, but that would take time that Obi-Wan wasn’t sure they had. Instead she tucked the blaster into her belt and raised her hands, and _pulled_ with the Force, so that every door in the hallways burst open.

“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said Mon Mothma, stepping out from a room several doors down from Padmé. Bail Organa and Rush Clovis emerged from their own cells, Clovis nearly tripping over one of the fallen bounty hunters before Bail stepped quickly sideways and steadied him.

Mon Mothma stooped and picked a necklace out of the glittering pile on the floor, dropping it into a pocket. Obi-Wan could tell that the deliberately casual motion was to cover up the way that her hands were shaking slightly – fury rather than fear, Obi-Wan sensed. Her internal clock, although still mildly karked up from her recent offworld travels, suggested that it was well past dawn – nearly noon, in fact. The Planetary Sovereignty vote had been first on the docket for the morning’s Senate votes. Mothma didn’t say anything, but she, Bail, and Padmé exchanged a series of grim looks. Obi-Wan felt the frustration coming off all three of them.

She cleared her throat. “Is anyone hurt?”

The four senators all shook their heads. Bail Organa reached down and swiftly removed a blaster from one of the bounty hunters, checking the charge. “There’s a landing pad on the roof,” he said. “That’s how they brought us in. The speeders are probably still there.”

Obi-Wan nodded. “My Padawan and two other Jedi are on the way with the Senate Guard,” she said, hoping she wasn’t lying. She could still feel Anakin in the Force, his nerves increasing the closer he got. Hopefully they were headed to the right place. “You ought to get to the roof, bar the door, and make sure that they see you.”

“What about you?” Padmé asked, overriding Clovis’s cry of, “You have to come with us!”

“I’ve got to have a word with the head bounty hunter,” Obi-Wan said, ignoring him. Reminded, she reached into her belt pouch and removed the holocomm she’d taken from the foreman’s office.

Padmé looked at it curiously, but took it without hesitation. “What’s this?”

“The only line we have to the man who hired them to kidnap you,” Obi-Wan said. She glanced at the other three senators, who were all watching, and lowered her voice. “The Blues will ask if you know anything about it, but I need you to tell them that you don’t. You have to take this to the Jedi Council. _Straight_ to the Jedi Council, if you can, but if not, give it to Master Quinlan Vos.”

To her credit, Padmé didn’t ask why. “Not Ani?”

“Anakin doesn’t have the rank to deal with it,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m sorry, Senator, I’d explain if I could, and if I can, I’ll do so later. But we don’t have the time now.”

“I’m going to hold you to that, Obi-Wan,” Padmé said. She slipped the holocomm into a pocket of her gown. “Be careful.”

“Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, feeling the edge of a smile tug at her lips, “when have you ever known me to be careful?”

At that, Padmé’s fine eyebrows arched upwards. She reached out and brushed her fingers across Obi-Wan’s cheek, having had enough experience with Jedi to know that the physical contact would get Obi-Wan’s attention – as if she didn’t have it already. “Try,” she said. “For me.”

Through the Force, Obi-Wan caught a thread of dismay from Rush Clovis, who was watching the display. It made her mouth twitch in amusement, and this time she sensed Padmé’s surprise at the expression.

“No promises, Senator,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’ll do what I can, since you’ll be the one left to explaining it to Anakin if anything goes amiss. And that’s not a fate that I would wish on my worst enemy.”

“Could we maybe get out of here?” Clovis interrupted. “I don’t really want to linger.”

Padmé looked at Obi-Wan.

“Go,” Obi-Wan said. “Remember what I said about the holocomm.”

Once she had seen the senators safely on their way – Obi-Wan was confident in Padmé’s ability to use a blaster, at least, and Bail Organa was almost as good as she was – Obi-Wan went back down to the lower level of the warehouse. By now she expected that the bounty hunters had noticed, if not her disappearance, at least the absence of the first three bounty hunters she had incapacitated. The senators had helped her drag the second trio into their former cells and Obi-Wan had used the Force to jam the doors, since she had broken the locks getting them open the first time.

_Get here soon, Anakin_ , Obi-Wan thought, but after the near-disaster of her last attempt at trying to get through to him, didn’t reach out to find him again. She would work out how to deal with that later, after everyone was safe.

Obi-Wan stopped on the landing, letting her hands curl comfortably around the butt of the blaster she was holding. It was warm from her body heat, but without the bright Force-point that a lightsaber would have had. There was no life in it. A Jedi’s lightsaber, after long use, could nearly become a living thing in itself.

She used the Force to open the door, instead of the motion sensor, and stepped out into a trap.

It wasn’t meant to be a trap. The bounty hunters there, two humanoids in armor and a female Wookiee hurrying down the hallway to join them, had been waiting for the lift to arrive. They turned in surprise to stare at her as the stairwell door slid open, but bounty hunters didn’t live this long by being stupid or having poor reflexes. They were reaching for their own blasters as Obi-Wan fired her first shots.

The stun blasts dissipated uselessly across the armor, which was one of the reasons Obi-Wan didn’t like blasters. She launched herself into a flying kick, booted foot knocking against one of the helmeted humanoids and sending him staggering back. As she did, she flung out her free hand, grabbing at empty air as she used the Force to throw his companion into the wall beside him. The bounty hunter slid unconscious to the floor.

His friend was already straightening up. Obi-Wan snatched the blaster out of his hand with the Force, letting it spin away across the floor. That didn’t stop him; he immediately fell into a fighting stance with his fists raised, and caught Obi-Wan’s heel with both hands as she flung another kick at him, tossing her back. She flipped and landed lightly on the floor, bouncing up into another powerful kick that shattered bone even through his armor when he tried to block it. The Wookiee roared in fury as he screamed, charging down the hallway towards Obi-Wan.

Obi-Wan spun a roundhouse kick into the bounty hunter’s neck, where the Force told her there was a weak point between his armor and his helmet. She heard bone crack, felt his spark of life go out of the Force, and turned away without regret.

She sprinted towards the Wookiee, meeting her midway down the hallway. Obi-Wan ran up her chest, snapping a kick off her chin before she flipped back, barely dodging a swipe of her clawed paws. She bounced off her hands and back to her feet, dodging again and sweeping her legs around to knock the Wookiee off her feet. The Wookiee fell – but swung her paw at Obi-Wan as she did. Obi-Wan wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid it entirely, and she screamed as the razor-sharp claws ripped across her abdomen, tearing apart the fabric and gouging open the flesh below.

“ _Sleep_ ,” she snarled, pain making her voice rough as she flung her hand out towards the Wookiee. For a moment she thought that the Force wasn’t going to cooperate with her – that kind of command usually didn’t work in the heat of battle – then the Wookiee slumped against the floor and went still, her chest rising and falling steadily.

Obi-Wan picked herself up off the floor, pressing her hand to her wound. Blood ran through her fingers, hot and wet; she reached for the Force to heal it and realized that in her current state, she would need to put herself into a healing trance to accomplish anything significant. She couldn’t even stop the bleeding. Wincing, she peeled away the cloth from the wound, peering at it. It didn’t seem to be as deep as she had initially feared, just messy, which made it a little less dire but not by much.

“Stang,” she swore softly, and settled for calling the blaster she’d dropped to her instead. She kept one hand on her wound, channeling the Force through it in tiny increments to dull the pain.

She hoped that she didn’t have to go looking for Bey’aaan. Hopefully the shots and sound of screaming would bring her – if not the security cameras, Obi-Wan thought, looking up at the blinking red light near the ceiling. She leaned against the wall, resisting the urge to reach out with the Force and check on Padmé and the others.

She didn’t have to wait long.

“I thought Jedi didn’t use blasters.”

Obi-Wan looked up. She had felt the Twi’lek woman’s approach through the Force, felt her hesitate when she had seen Obi-Wan, then proceed onwards. “Most of us don’t,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t know how.” She raised the blaster and aimed at Bey’aaan.

Bey’aaan didn’t seem much bothered by having a blaster pointed at her. She stuck her thumbs in her belt and looked Obi-Wan up and down. “Is she dead?” she asked, indicating the Wookiee.

“No,” Obi-Wan said. “Just sleeping. He is, though.” She jerked her chin towards the armored bounty hunter that she had killed.

“I suppose you did for the rest of these idiots too,” said Bey’aaan, her gaze flicking over the hallway. “That’s the last time I outsource. The senators?”

“Gone,” Obi-Wan said. She could see her lightsaber hanging off the Twi’lek’s belt. “Most bounty hunters would have left by now.”

“Most bounty hunters don’t have a payout of a million creds waiting for them.” She gave Obi-Wan another thoughtful onceover, her gaze lingering on Obi-Wan’s abdomen. Obi-Wan resisted the urge to look down, knowing what Bey’aaan saw. It looked worse than it really was.

“How much were you paid to kidnap the senators?” she asked, stalling. She could feel the Force quivering with the approach of more Jedi, overshadowing the Senate Blues accompanying them.

“Three hundred thou,” said Bey’aaan. “Not bad for a day’s work, hmm? We weren’t even supposed to keep them.”

“Why?” The blaster she was holding didn’t waver, but Obi-Wan was aware that she would start doing so, very soon. A few hours of unconsciousness didn’t make up for a concussion and a full day before that, and her control of the Force was fast fraying, since she had had to expend most of her attention on keeping Anakin out of her head.

Bey’aaan shrugged. “Just a job, Master Jedi,” she said. “As delivering you to my employer is going to be. Between this and your lightsaber here, I’m going to make a nice profit. Especially since I don’t have to split it anymore, thanks to you.”

“Your employer,” Obi-Wan said. “What do you know about him? Who is he?”

Annoyance flashed across the Twi’lek’s face. “This isn’t an interrogation, Master Jedi. You’re wounded. If you want to live, you’d better put that blaster down and come with me. My employer isn’t paying a million creds for a dead Jedi.”

There was something niggling at Obi-Wan, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “It will be a cold day on Mustafar before that happens, I’m afraid.”

Bey’aaan put her hand on the butt of her still-holstered blaster. “I like you, Master Jedi,” she said. “It’s too bad you _are_ a Jedi – we might have had some fun otherwise. As it is, right now you’re just a pile of creds that hasn’t been banked yet.” She pulled the blaster out of its holster and fired.

Obi-Wan flung her bloody hand up and caught the blaster bolt in her palm. It glowed for a second with the force of the stun blast as she drew the energy inside the confines of her skin, then the glow vanished. Obi-Wan allowed herself the edge of a smile before she returned her hand to her wound.

Bey’aaan’s eyes had widened slightly, but that was the only sign of surprise that she showed. “Impressive,” she said, then pulled the trigger again.

Obi-Wan dove out of the way, coming up on her knees with both hands clamped tightly around her blaster as she fired. She missed, the stun blast flaring harmlessly on the wall past Bey’aaan as the Twi’lek approached, and was forced to catch another blast on the tips of her fingers. This time her entire arm went numb for a precious few seconds before Obi-Wan could shake it off.

There was nowhere to hide in the narrow corridor, nothing to use for cover, and without her lightsaber Obi-Wan could only hope to repel blaster bolts a handful of times before she was overcome.

_Trust in the living Force, my young padawan. You think too much._

It was what Master Qui-Gon would have said, and _had_ said to her too many times to count. Obi-Wan didn’t pause to consider where the thought had come from. She opened herself up to the Force – _oh, Anakin’s here_ , she noted absently; up on the roof above and distracted enough by Padmé that he had forgotten to be worried about Obi-Wan for a precious few seconds – and straightened up. She walked straight towards Bey’aaan, into the Twi’lek’s blasterfire, and felt the blasts brush harmlessly past her, pushed aside by the Force.

She was at point-blank range, close enough that even the Force wouldn’t be able to protect her, when she swung her blaster so hard into Bey’aaan’s face that the other woman spun around, her lekku slapping across Obi-Wan’s cheek before she fell. Her blood dripped down the barrel of Obi-Wan’s blaster.

Obi-Wan flipped the safety on and tossed it aside. “So uncivilized,” she said, calling her lightsaber to her hand. It came away from Bey’aaan’s belt, wavering a little in the air before Obi-Wan caught it.

She sat down on the floor beside the unconscious bounty hunter, pressing her free hand against her wounded abdomen, and waited for Anakin and the others to arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not in the habit of making excuses or apologies for long pauses between chapters, but since this one was fairly extensive even for me, I'll go ahead and say that since the last time I was actively writing (May 2012; although the interlude went up in December, most of it was already complete by then), I finished my BA, moved states, moved countries, started grad school, finish my MA work, and moved countries again. It's been a busy year.


	7. Chapter 7

Obi-Wan had a distinct sense of déjà vu as she stood in front of the Jedi High Council. Rain battered against the transparisteel windows of the round chamber, just as it had barely a week ago, and Obi-Wan was once again dripping water on the polished floor while the Council pretended not to notice. Although the sky had been clear when she had left the Jedi Temple the previous evening, at some point during the night the weather had taken a turn for the worse; their open speeder had emerged topside into a torrential downpour that had soaked the four Jedi inside within the seconds it took Aayla to get the convertible roof up. Anakin, predictably, had squealed like a blistered piika kit, his desert heritage reasserting itself.

Upon returning to the Temple, they were immediately been whisked in front of the Council for an emergency debrief. Obi-Wan recounted the events of the previous evening, trying to gauge the Council’s mood towards her appearance at Senator Mothma’s dinner, then her actions after she had woken up at the warehouse. She left out the conversation she had with the Sith Lord, though she hesitated over it and knew that they realized it. The holocomm Padmé had returned to her remained in the belt pouch where she had tucked it away, a small weight that seemed heavier than it really was. Sometime between retrieving it from Padmé and arriving at the Temple, the insides of the device had melted down to slag, rendering it essentially useless.

She stepped back from the center of the council chamber as Quinlan and Aayla began their debrief. Anakin should have joined them, but he moved to stand beside Obi-Wan instead, apparently content to stay quiet instead of adding his voice to Quinlan’s account. Obi-Wan could feel him in the Force, a warm and comfortable presence that stood in stark contrast to the earlier hysteria that had stabbed at her mind. With her Padawan beside her, safe at the heart of the Jedi’s most sacred sanctum, Obi-Wan finally felt her own breathing start to even out, her shoulders slumping as her earlier tension drained out. The wound on her abdomen, now plastered with bacta bandages, throbbed dully, but the pain was little more than a distant distraction, easily pushed aside by the Force. Lulled by the bulwark of Anakin’s affection and the warmth of the chamber, Obi-Wan let her vision slide out of focus, feeling her mind slip into a quasi-meditative state.

_Blasterfire in the distance. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air, even here at the highest spire of the Temple. The younglings had fled at the urging of the crèche master, but in the chaos they had lost track of the Padawan tasked with getting them out of the Temple. Instead they had found the turbolift that rose directly to the top of the Council Spire and retreated here, hoping that they would be found by a Master or a Knight who would know what to do. At the sound of the lift rising, most hid behind the empty chairs. All of them carried lightsabers, but while they could repel blaster bolts, they were otherwise useless as weapons – just practice lightsabers that weren’t meant to do serious damage while their bearers learned their use. If it came to a fight, they might be able to hold off their attackers for a few minutes at most, but then they would die. Here in the council hamber there was nowhere else to retreat._

_The lift had gone back down some time ago. Now it rose again, steadily ticking upwards towards the chamber. The doors slid open, revealing a familiar hooded and cloaked figure inside._

_“Master –”_

_A lightsaber ignited with a hiss._

Obi-Wan let out a small gasp as the vision threw her out, her eyes sliding back into focus. The entire experience had only taken a few seconds; none of the other Jedi in the chamber seemed to have noticed her brief trance. Only Anakin had turned to look at her, his eyes wide and concerned. He would have felt it in the Force, of course.

She felt his question reverberate in her head, so clearly they were nearly real words rather than just a collection of emotions and images. _Master? Are you all right?_

She shook her head slightly, hoping that the Council members were too focused on Quinlan and Aayla’s report to notice the gesture. Anakin dropped his gaze. Obi-Wan could sense his desire to reach out to her, but even he knew better than to do so in front of the Council. As a general rule, most Jedi weren’t terribly keen on physical touch, since it could easily serve as an accidental conduit in the Force between careless individuals.

As Quinlan finished, she saw Master Yoda’s gaze move to her. He raised one green, three-fingered hand and said, “Distracted you are, Master Kenobi. Something else you are keeping from us there is?”

Obi-Wan felt Anakin stiffen, the thread of his fury sliding through the Force before he wrestled it down, but ignored it as she reached inside her cloak and removed the holocomm from her belt pouch. She stepped forward as Quinlan and Aayla retreated to stand beside Anakin in front of the chamber doors, Quinlan’s hand closing on the sleeve of Anakin’s cloak to keep him from following Obi-Wan onto the floor.

“My apologies, Masters,” she said. She held the holocomm out so that they could see it, balancing it on her palm as she spoke. Psychometry wasn’t one of her wild talents, as it was Quin’s, and neither was a connection with electronics the way it was Anakin’s – though he denied his skill as a mechanic had anything to do with the Force – but even she could feel the deadness in the device. It was as though every scrap of history that it had had ever had, that it should have had, had been wiped clean from the Force. 

“This is the holocomm that the bounty hunter Bey’aaan used to speak to her employer,” she went on. “I activated it in an attempt to contact the Temple, but found that it had only one dial available. I called it hoping that I would be able to identify the employer.”

“And did you?” Master Ki-Adi-Mundi asked.

Obi-Wan shook her head, picking her next words carefully. “His face was concealed, I’m afraid, and I didn’t recognize his voice.” She hesitated, but there was no way around saying it. “I felt the Dark Side around him, just as I felt it around the Sith Lord on Naboo.”

She could not have caused more consternation if she had released a live nexu into the room, since that disturbance would have simply been accounted for by one of the Masters igniting their lightsaber and taking care of the disruption immediately before returning to the matter at hand with barely a breath lost. Instead, although no one in the chamber moved, it was as though the air itself had suddenly become electrified. The lights flickered, the transparisteel windows bowed outwards, and the holocomm shuddered in Obi-Wan’s palm before it flew off. Master Windu caught it neatly, and Obi-Wan lowered her hand.

Her head throbbed with the power surrounding her and yet, somewhat to her surprise, Obi-Wan found herself standing her ground. She could feel the Force as she had only felt it once before, pressed so close and so thickly around her that she half-fancied that she could reach out and shape it with her bare hands, use it as she pleased without repercussions. It hummed along her skin, sat thick and rich on her tongue, murmured in her mind. _Threat_ , the Force whispered to her, and, _kin_.

Flames rolled across the insides of the windows before her. Distantly, as if from another life, Obi-Wan heard the sound of children screaming and the relentless hum of a lightsaber stabbing through flesh.

Almost as soon as it had begun, the moment passed. Obi-Wan found herself breathing hard in the sudden emptiness of the room, her hands clasped into fists beneath the concealing sleeves of her robe. Anakin’s alarm throbbed in the back of her skull, though she didn’t look over her shoulder to see if he had made any physical indication of it. What remained in the chamber wasn’t wrath, but a kind of wariness that she had never felt before. Mention of the Sith no longer meant the purely academic concern that had accompanied Qui-Gon’s report of the Zabrak assassin on Tatooine; the Jedi knew now that their oldest enemy had returned.

Windu turned the holocomm over in his hands, his expression inscrutable. Even from here Obi-Wan could feel the deadness in the thing, like a black hole in the Force. “Are you certain, Obi-Wan?”

“This is not the first time I have felt the power of the Dark Side,” Obi-Wan said. “I would not mistake it for anything else.”

“What did he say?”

Obi-Wan recounted the conversation that they had. _Balance, my dear_ , she remembered the Sith Lord saying, and felt the Force beat so strongly at her mind that she thought her skull would explode.

“Troubling news this is,” Master Yoda said after she had finished.

“Is there a reason that you sought to conceal this from us, Master Kenobi?” Adi Gallia asked.

“No, Master Gallia,” said Obi-Wan, ignoring Anakin’s flush of anger. “The holocomm has been destroyed, leaving no traceable psychic residue – Quinlan Vos can vouch for that. There is no way to verify what I have said.”

“How is this possible?” asked Ki-Adi-Mundi, though the question wasn’t directed at her. “I have never heard of such a thing in living memory. I thought that skill lost.”

“Difficult, such things are,” said Master Yoda. “But not lost. A skill seldom practiced by Jedi it is. For a long time little need has there been.”

“This is a Jedi skill?” Obi-Wan said, surprised. “I thought –”

“Few skills there are only Jedi, only Sith,” said Yoda, his tone faintly rebuking.

Obi-Wan bowed her head in apology.

“No one else touched this after you took it?” Windu asked.

Obi-Wan hesitated, then admitted, “I gave it to Senator Amidala of Naboo to give to the Council in case I didn’t return, but Padmé – Senator Amidala – isn’t Force-sensitive. She wouldn’t be able to do this. Besides, when she gave it back to me it was still active.”

“Amidala of Naboo is known to us,” Windu said. “And to you, Obi-Wan. From your account, this – Dark Acolyte – seemed to recognize you.”

“It was _not_ Senator Amidala,” Obi-Wan said, sensing Anakin’s outrage and cutting him off before he said something that they would all regret. “The speaker was a man, I’m certain of it. And Padmé was imprisoned along with the other senators at the time.”

“But they were not imprisoned together,” Adi Gallia point out.

“Padmé isn’t a Sith Lord!” Anakin burst out. “That creature on Naboo tried to _kill_ her!”

Obi-Wan didn’t drop her head into her hands, but it was a near thing. Instead she focused her gaze on a point just over Master Windu’s right shoulder as Ki-Adi-Mundi said, “We must consider all possibilities, young Skywalker, no matter how unlikely.”

“If this Sith did recognize me, Master Windu,” Obi-Wan said, without meeting his eyes, “then it was nothing more than coincidence. The bounty hunters didn’t know that I was going to be at the party; I didn’t know until the day before, and Senator Mothma wouldn’t have spread my name around without knowing for sure that I was going to be there. If their employer had planned on my capture, there would have been plans in my place for my, um, disposal. Instead they seemed to be making it up as they went. But,” she added reluctantly, “he did know my name. He recognized me when I activated the holocomm. Bey’aaan never used my name. I don’t think that she knew it; she only called me ‘Master Jedi.’”

At this, Anakin’s alarm rang through the Force like a struck bell. Obi-Wan shut her eyes, knowing that the Council had to have sensed this and hoping that they didn’t take it as anything more than a Padawan’s concern for his Master. She didn’t want them to know just how fragile Anakin’s control really was when it came to the emotions that most Jedi should have tamped down by this point in their training.

If anyone in the Council noticed it, they made no sign. “This development is troubling,” said Windu, finally laying the holocomm aside. “It bears further investigation – not by you, Obi-Wan, I’m sure that you understand that you are emotionally compromised on this matter.”

Obi-Wan bowed slightly. “I understand perfectly, Master Windu.”

It seemed to be a dismissal, and Obi-Wan was prepared to take it as one before Windu went on, “Chancellor Palpatine has requested an audience with you, Obi-Wan. I’ve put him off until tomorrow so that you can get looked at by the healers and have a night’s rest. I trust that you’ll keep these recent developments inside the walls of this chamber.”

This time it was a dismissal. Obi-Wan bowed to the Council, noting the empty chair with Shaak Ti normally sat, and retreated. Anakin fell into step beside her, glancing over his shoulder as Quinlan was called onto the floor again. Hopefully his psychometric talents could find something where Obi-Wan’s more ordinary ones had been incapable.

“They don’t seriously think that Padmé is a – a Dark Acolyte, do they?” Anakin said after the turbolift doors had closed behind them and they had begun their descent. He stumbled over the unfamiliar phrase, which was seldom heard even in the Temple’s classrooms. “I mean, that’s crazy!”

“I don’t,” Obi-Wan said, letting herself lean back against the lift wall. “And I don’t think anyone in the High Council does, either. It doesn’t make any sense considering what happened on Naboo and they know that.”

This appeared to satisfy Anakin. He went quiet, his arms wrapped around himself. Obi-Wan thought about reprimanding him for his earlier outburst in the Council, but decided against it; he would have already sensed their disapproval. Besides, he had been through enough already in the past day.

“Why does Palpatine want to talk to you?” Anakin asked abruptly.

Obi-Wan rubbed a hand over her forehead. “I don’t know.” _He probably wants to make cutting remarks about how the kidnapping never would have happened if Anakin had been there._

Unfortunately, Anakin caught the thought. He looked at her and began, “I could have –”

She pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “Does it really matter, my young Padawan? It’s passed.”

He glanced down. “Sorry, Master.”

The doors opened, depositing them on the ground floor of the spire. Obi-Wan pressed her fingers to her bandaged abdomen as they made their way towards the Halls of Healing, Anakin continually shooting her worried looks.

As usual, there were few other Jedi in the Halls of Healing – a few Padawans and younglings who had injured themselves in training and a handful of Knights recovering from wounds sustained offworld. Obi-Wan was swept off by the Chief Healer, a Twi’lek woman named Vokara Che, and sat down on one of the nearest beds, pulling her tunics and undershirt off to reveal her hastily bandaged wound. Anakin sat down cross-legged on the bed beside her, watching curiously as Master Che carefully peeled the bandage away.

“A Wookiee did this?” she asked, picking up a container of antibiotic salve.

Obi-Wan nodded. “I didn’t sense any poison on her claws, but I wasn’t exactly at full strength.”

Anakin glanced down, his cheeks reddening. “I didn’t sense any either,” he said quickly. “And I put the bandages on.”

“You did well, young Skywalker,” Master Che said, holding the salve in one hand as she held the other a few centimeters over the wound. Obi-Wan felt the Force gather around her, cool and green against her skin before Master Che released it. “No need for a healing, I think. Another day of bacta and you’ll be well except for a scar.”

“What about the concussion?” Anakin asked worriedly as she began to spread the salve on. Obi-Wan hissed a little; it stung.

“Let me see,” the Chief Healer said, putting the salve aside and standing. She wiped her fingers clean on her robe and came around the side of the bed to tilt Obi-Wan’s head forward, parting her hair with her long fingers. “Nasty, this. What happened?”

“I was stunned, I clipped my head on a marble floor going down,” Obi-Wan explained. The Force hummed against the back of her skull as Master Che prodded at the lump.

“This I can do something about,” she said. “Most concussions are harmless, but there’s no point in not being careful.”

Anakin’s relief warmed the Force, counterpoint to the cool of Master Che’s touch. Obi-Wan shut her eyes, breathing in and out in a brief meditative pattern to aid the healing process. Within seconds, she felt the ache in her head face and cease entirely, the flesh closing up and knitting back together. Master Che took her hand away. “Much better,” she said.

“Thank you, Master Che,” Obi-Wan said.

Master Che came back around and resumed bandaging the wound again. “Your Padawan hasn’t yet taken a course in healing, I believe.”

“Um,” Anakin said, as Obi-Wan said, “Not yet, no. I’ve done what I can, but I don’t have much skill at healing myself.”

“Why not do a term in the Halls of Healing while your Padawan takes a class?” Master Che offered. “Many Knights and Padawans do so. Your own Master did.”

Obi-Wan bowed her head. “That was more than ten years ago. Yes, I remember. I will consider it, Master Che.”

The Twi’lek Healer finished bandaging the wound and sat back, wiping her fingers clean. “Please do, Obi-Wan. I think that it would be good for both of you. Besides,” she added, a twinkle in her eye, “it might keep you out of trouble.”

“A welcome thought,” Obi-Wan said, but some quirk of the Force made her add, “though not, I think, a likely outcome.” She reached for her discarded undershirt and tunics, but Master Che whisked them away before her hand fell.

“I’ll dispose of these,” she said, since the garments were torn and covered in blood and bacta. No one in the Council chamber had so much as raised an eyebrow at a Jedi Knight coming before them looking as if she had just stepped off a battlefield.

_You haven’t seen a battlefield yet, Jedi,_ the Force whispered. _You will._ The thought was there and gone again so quickly that her mind barely registered it.

Obi-Wan looked down at the brassiere that was now the only garment she wore besides her trousers. Anakin was staring at the ceiling with a studiousness that it didn’t deserve, although Obi-Wan didn’t know what was so distracting; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen her in less before. “Um,” she said.

Master Che laughed. “I’ll find you something to wear,” she said. “Just a minute.” She whisked Obi-Wan’s bloodied tunics away, returning a few moments later with a clean undershirt in Obi-Wan’s size, though not her usual colors.

Obi-Wan pulled it on, grateful for the dry fabric. Despite the warmth of the council chamber, she was still soaked through from the rain shower on the planet’s surface. She was looking forward to a hot bath, clean clothes, a hot meal, and sleeping for the better part of a standard day, in that order.

“Yes, I think that would be wise,” Master Che said, apparently having caught the thought. “Come back tomorrow or the day after and someone will look at that wound again.”

Obi-Wan picked up her sodden cloak and stood up. “Thank you, Master Che. I’ll think on your offer.”

Anakin scrambled off the bed after her, bumping his shoulder familiarly against hers as they left the Halls of Healing. Obi-Wan hadn’t recovered her comlink, but Anakin still had his, and she used it to call the Temple kitchens and have them send something hot up to her rooms, since neither she nor Anakin seemed up to cooking tonight. By the time they got there, someone from the Temple kitchen staff had already been and gone, leaving a covered tray on their kitchen table.

Obi-Wan dropped her cloak onto the coatrack, kicking off her boots and nearly tripping over her own feet in the process. “Stars’ end,” she said wearily as the door slid shut behind Anakin, then saw the blinking light on her holocomm and swore again, this time in Huttese.

Anakin’s eyebrows went up. “Where did you learn _that_?” he said, sitting down on the floor to take off his own boots. He sounded impressed.

“From you, my young Padawan,” Obi-Wan said, making her way over to the holocomm. She pressed the playback button, running a hand through her loose hair. “Learning goes both ways, I’ve found.”

Bail Organa appeared in the projection. He was wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing when the Senate Guard had taken him back to 500 Republica, but his expression was more harassed than Obi-Wan had ever seen him before. _“Obi-Wan, Bail Organa here,” he said. “I know the Supreme Chancellor has summoned you tomorrow. I need you to come by my office before you meet with him. It’s important.”_

The transmission ended. Obi-Wan rubbed her hand over her face. “I have a bad feeling about this,” she sighed. “What _now_?”

“Sleep on it,” Anakin advised. He lifted the cloche over the tray sent up by the kitchens and made an appreciative sound. “There’s dawasek soup, Master. And steamed chuwa buns. And –”

“Go ahead and eat if you like, Anakin,” Obi-Wan said, cutting him off. “I need to wash the blood out of my hair and put on something dry. I advise that you do the same before you catch cold.”

Anakin dropped the cloche back over the tray. “Um, yes,” he said.

Obi-Wan dragged both hands through her hair, wincing at the movement pulled at her wound, and went into her room to find something clean to wear once she had showered. Anakin was right. If something else was happening, she wanted to be clean, well-fed, and rested before she had to deal with it.

*

When she left the next morning, Anakin was still asleep. At some point in the night he had crept into her room and curled up next to her, the way he hadn’t done since he was younger and still desperate for the human comfort that he was accustomed to from his upbringing. Obi-Wan could vaguely remember waking up just enough to acknowledge his presence and make sure that he had brought a blanket with him before falling back to sleep with his contentment warm in the back of her mind.

Although it was still early when she arrived, the Senate Building was already busy with activity, senators, staff, lobbyists, and droids rushing past her and shouting at each other. Votes on the preliminary bills would continue throughout the week and into the next, then the Senate would break for a short recess before beginning debates on bills that had been passed the previous season. It was an arduous and, as far as Obi-Wan was concerned, largely pointless process since the few bills that actually made it to the floor of the entire Senate tended to be so innocuous as to be utterly useless to the Republic.

Not all senators retained private offices within the Senate Building itself, but Alderaan did through long tradition as one of the oldest members of the Republic, even though Bail Organa was a relatively junior senator. Obi-Wan made her way there, dodging politicians as she went. Several times she was hailed by someone she half-knew and endured a minute or two of polite conversation – there was a certain prestige in being seen with a Jedi Knight, especially one with a minor galactic reputation like Obi-Wan. Security seemed much higher than it had been the last time she had been here, Senate Guards in evidence at regular intervals throughout the building’s twisting corridors as well as patrolling in pairs. Obi-Wan, in her Jedi robes, wasn’t stopped, but she saw several others pulled aside and marched off by the Blues.

She recognized one of the Guards standing outside the doors to the Alderaanian offices from his presence at the warehouse yesterday. Although his face was concealed by his helmet, he had a strong, clear presence in the Force that suggested a clarity of spirit, as well as a sensitivity that might have given him a place in the Order if he had been discovered early enough.

“Officer Omin,” she said, nodding to him.

“Master Kenobi.” He didn’t seem surprised that she had recognized him. “Senator Organa is expecting you. Please, go in.”

Bail somehow looked even worse than he had yesterday, apparently on his third cup of caf of the morning (if the empty mugs were anything to go by) and surrounded, as usual, by datapads and flimisplasts. To Obi-Wan’s surprise, Padmé was there too, perched on a corner of the table and holding up a flimsiplast.

“Senators,” Obi-Wan said, raising an eyebrow.

“Obi-Wan!” Padmé said, dropping the flimsiplast. “You look much better.”

Obi-Wan eyed her. “You don’t,” she said; there were bags under Padmé’s eyes, barely concealed by her makeup, and her long hair was pulled back into three plain buns at the back of her head rather than anything more elaborate. “You don’t look like you’ve gotten any sleep at all. Nor do you, Bail.”

“There were a few hours in there,” Bail said, indicating a chair. Obi-Wan had to move a stack of flimsiplasts in order to sit down, waving aside the droid that came up to offer her a cup of caf. “The Military Creation Bill is up tomorrow, and Padmé and I both have two more before the vote ends. And of course the damned Planetary Sovereignty Bill passed while we were locked up, vape it all.”

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said, sighing. She had suspected as much, and checking the HoloNet reports before leaving the Temple had borne out her suspicions. “A kidnapping isn’t grounds for a revote?”

“Welcome to politics, Obi-Wan,” Bail said, rolling his eyes. “Kidnapping is a very old and sadly very effective tradition in the Senate. I’m half-tempted to go slap Rush Clovis across the face with a glove and accuse the Banking Clan of masterminding the whole thing, since they got the results they wanted, except it’s too subtle for them.”

Obi-Wan raised her eyebrows. “That’s subtle?”

“For the Galactic Senate? Sadly, yes. The only person who actually got shot was you, after all, and they didn’t expect you there.” He tapped a stylus against his desk. “But that’s not why I asked you to come by.”

“It has something to do with what happened yesterday?”

He and Padmé glanced at each other. “What did the High Council say?” she asked, evading the question.

Obi-Wan shrugged. “They’re interested in who was behind the kidnapping, but there isn’t really much to go on.” At Padmé’s raised eyebrow, she shook her head slightly, not wanting to go into it. “There was some talk of assigning someone to investigate – it won’t be me, probably Master Vos and his Padawan – but it’s not really Jedi business since my involvement was accidental. We don’t really like to interfere on Coruscant unless we’re requested. The last thing the Order wants to do is get into another jurisdictional spat with the Blues.”

Bail stroked his beard. “Well, now there’s even less to go on. The Guard transport speeder carrying the bounty hunters back from the warehouse crashed on its way back to the surface. Everyone onboard was killed.”

“What?” Obi-Wan said, startled. “An accident?”

“According to the Guard. Apparently it was struck by a freighter that was emerging from one of the other levels. Food pastes scattered down the descent corridor from Level 367 to Level 1510.” He picked up his mug, looked at it – empty, apparently – and put it back down. “I’m no detective, Obi-Wan, but that’s a little suspicious, isn’t it?”

“More than a little,” Obi-Wan said softly, twisting a braid around one finger. “Especially considering – other things.”

His eyebrows went up. “You Jedi did find something out.”

Padmé said, “We’ve already swept the room for bugs twice already today. Tell him, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan held up a hand to forestall her and shut her eyes, letting her consciousness roll out. Scanning for electronic surveillance with the Force wasn’t easy, but she had learned a trick or two from Anakin, who had a gift for such things. She opened her eyes.

Padmé began to speak, but Obi-Wan held up a hand to stop her and walked over to the serving droid that had offered her the caf. “Can I be of service, Master Jedi?” it asked.

“Excuse me,” Obi-Wan said, reaching around to shut it off.

“What –” Bail began indignantly.

Obi-Wan held up her hand again, cutting him off, and ran her fingers down the droid’s chestplate until she found the latch to pop it often. The bug was smaller than her smallest fingernail; Obi-Wan used the Force to pry it loose, turned around to show it to Bail and Padmé – both of them gaping – and ignited her lightsaber, dropping the bug onto the blade. It dissolved in a burst of sparks and melted circuitry.

“That’s all I could sense,” she said, extinguishing her lightsaber and hanging it on her belt. “Sorry about the theatrics, Bail.”

“We could have traced that,” Padmé said slowly as Obi-Wan resumed her seat.

She shook her head. “I’ve seen them before. They’re expensive because they’re hard to detect, but there are a dozen sellers on Coruscant alone that I know of. One of the Jedi who works primarily onworld would know more.”

Bail covered his face with his hands. “Stars’ end! Essee’s been in here all day every day since I came back from Alderaan for the new session – has she been bugged that entire time?”

Obi-Wan shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Bail. It does suggest that something you’re doing has drawn attention.”

“Which is a good thing,” Bail said. “I think. At least Essee stays here instead of coming back to 500 Republica with me, so she hasn’t been transmitting anything from my apartments. I’ll have my people look into it. You don’t think Padmé –”

“I can sweep your office and your apartments for you if you’d like,” Obi-Wan said to her, “or get Anakin to do it, he’s better than I am at that sort of thing, but you’re probably safe because you’re so junior – no offense.”

“None taken. Mon, though –”

“If you were bugged, Bail, then she certainly is,” Obi-Wan said. “Do you have any idea who? As far as I know, those devices don’t transmit more than a kilometer or so.”

“It could be almost anyone in the Senate,” Bail said. “Including the Supreme Chancellor.” He rubbed at his forehead again. “Well, now that I know to yell at my security staff, what was it you were going to tell us, Obi-Wan?”

She sighed. “I was hoping that you had forgotten about that.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as she tried to decide the best way to put it without giving too much away. “After I overheard Bey’aaan and her employer bargaining for my purchase, I snuck in and tried to use her holocomm to contact the Jedi Temple. I couldn’t – there was only one dial available, so I called that instead. I thought I could find out who had hired Bey’aaan to kidnap you and the other senators.”

Bail frowned. “I thought we didn’t know – that’s something the Blues should know, Obi-Wan –”

“No,” Obi-Wan said. “It’s Jedi business. I didn’t recognize him – he covered his face – but he recognized me.”

“That still doesn’t make it –”

“He was a Force user. A user of the Dark Side of the Force.”

Padmé let out a small gasp, but when Obi-Wan and Bail looked over her expression showed no sign of her distress. “Was he like the assassin on Naboo?” she asked – what Maul had been called in the official reports.

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m afraid that he is.”

Her friend’s eyes went wide with alarm. Bail looked between them and said, “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

It was clear that he wouldn’t be content to be fobbed off without a further explanation. “There are two sides of the Force,” Obi-Wan said, picking her words as carefully as she would in front of a classroom of younglings. “Jedi use what we call the Light Side, but there’s another, the Dark Side. It’s – it’s inimical to everything the Jedi stand for. A long time ago, my order had an opposite. They called themselves the Sith.”

“The Sith Empire?” Bail said, surprising Obi-Wan. “But I thought they were wiped out millennia ago by the Old Republic.”

“The Sith and the Sith Empire aren’t the same thing, no more than the Jedi and the Republic are,” Obi-Wan said. “There used to be a – I suppose you’d call it a Sith Order, though that might give them too much credit. Their way of using the Force – the Dark Side – isn’t exactly conducive to having thousands of them running around. One reason that the Jedi have always been able to hold them off is because they spent as much time killing each other as they did killing us. Until about six years ago, we thought that they had wiped themselves out a thousand years ago.”

“Six years ago,” Bail repeated. “You mean – the invasion of Naboo. But the Trade Federation was behind that, weren’t they?”

Obi-Wan ran a hand through her hair. “Yes. But there was someone else involved. We don’t know who – the Neimodians weren’t talking, unfortunately. Whoever he was, they were more afraid of him than they were of the Jedi.” She glanced at Padmé, who looked back steadily. “I was upset. My presence might not have helped. There was an assassin, a Zabrak, who used a red double-bladed lightsaber – we call it a saberstaff. My Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, thought that he had been sent to assassinate the Queen.”

“You,” Bail said to Padmé; she nodded.

“When we took the Palace,” Obi-Wan went on, “he met us there. It wasn’t Padmé that he was after, it was us – Qui-Gon and I. We dueled him there. He was –” She licked her lips, the memory still far too vivid despite the intervening years. “He was very skilled. He managed to separate us; there are ray shields in the reactor room at the Palace and I was cut off from Qui-Gon. He killed my Master,” Obi-Wan said. She wasn’t looking at him, but she heard Bail’s sharp intake of breath. She glanced down at her hands, at the lightsaber hanging on her belt. “I killed him. That’s why I never stood my Trials. By long tradition, a Padawan who kills a Sith Lord has passed their Knight’s Trials in combat.”

“I don’t understand,” Bail said. “What does this have to do with the Sith? I thought that you said they were extinct.”

Obi-Wan ran her hands through her hair and straightened up. “That’s what we thought too. We’ve had Dark Jedi before – Jedi who turn to the Dark Side of the Force, for one reason or another. The Dark Side can be…very tempting.” She glanced down at her hands again, now hanging loosely between her knees. “Some of them even call themselves Sith – there’s a title for that. Darth. Nute Gunray of the Trade Federation told me what this assassin was called.”

“Maul,” Padmé said softly. She had remained in the throne room while Obi-Wan had interrogated Gunray, cold with grief and rage and the Force humming through her. “Darth Maul.”

“That’s a terrible name,” Bail said, still looking puzzled.

“Yes, well, the Sith aren’t terribly keen on subtle,” Obi-Wan said. It was easier to think of it as ancient history, something long dead. “In the Jedi histories, they all have names like Scourge and Bane. According to our accounts, they leave certain traces in the Force. Think of it like – like a blight. Those traces were there on Naboo. They can last centuries on some planets, but Maul wasn’t on Naboo for very long. They faded soon after the Council arrived, but remained long enough to be identified. There might have been other evidence that wasn’t explained to me at the time, since I was –” She looked down again. “I was distracted. And I was very junior, then. It’s not the sort of thing that you tell a green Knight with a new Padawan if there’s any way to avoid it.”

Padmé’s hands were clenched into fists. “The Jedi High Council told me at the time that they believed that an unknown Sith Lord – apparently they always come in twos?” She glanced at Obi-Wan.

“Master and apprentice,” Obi-Wan muttered. “Like the Jedi, but twisted.”

“That an unknown Sith Lord may have been behind the Trade Federation’s occupation of Naboo,” Padmé finished. “Gunray said as much to me and Obi-Wan, but he was too afraid to give us a name, even with Maul dead. Unfortunately for us, the Federation lawyers showed up before the rest of the Jedi did.”

Obi-Wan sighed. “We weren’t able to interrogate Gunray and the other Trade Federation officials further. Actually, they sued us – well, me, but our lawyers cleared that up.”

“The Jedi have lawyers?” Bail said, raising his eyebrows.

“You would be surprised at the number of lawsuits filed against us every year,” Obi-Wan said. She sat back, dragged her hands through her hair again. “Anakin alone has had a dozen in the past six years. Mostly traffic violations, to be fair.”

His mouth quirked, then his expression sobered again. “What does this have to do with our abduction? You think that the man who hired the bounty hunters is one of these Sith?”

“Because he told me that he was,” Obi-Wan said. “He knew who I was. He knew my _name_. And he knew what had happened on Naboo. There are only a handful of people who know what really happened on Naboo, not just the story that we told the Senate and the HoloNet. Two of them are sitting in this room. You make three.”

Bail shook his head. “But why us? What kind of interest would a – a Sith Lord have in the Planetary Sovereignty Bill? In Republic politics, for that matter?”

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said. “That’s why this has to be a Jedi matter.”

“Obi-Wan, I don’t know –”

“She’s right, Bail,” Padmé said. “The Sith on Naboo – he was beyond anything that any of us could have dealt with. No ordinary being could have faced him and lived.”

“But if this is a threat to the Republic –”

“Then we will handle it,” Obi-Wan said firmly. “I know that some members of the Senate doubt the Jedi, but we serve the Republic, Bail. The Sith are our fight. They have been for more than six millennia.”

Bail massaged his forehead, looking at Padmé. “You knew all this already.”

“I did,” she nodded. “Grand Master Yoda explained some of it to me on Naboo six years ago. Chancellor Palpatine knows too. We agreed – we all agreed – that it was best to keep it quiet.”

“I don’t know,” Bail said again. “I really don’t –”

“There’s one more thing,” Obi-Wan said, and when they both looked at her, explained about the ruined holocomm. “Hopefully Quinlan can get something off it,” she said, “but I don’t think that he will. And if he can’t, then there isn’t anything there. He has the strongest psychometric gift that the Kiffar have seen in over a century, the Jedi in six.”

“So there’s no proof,” Bail said, shutting his eyes. “No proof for any of it.”

“Just my word,” Obi-Wan said with a forced smile. “And my word on the subject of the Sith is notoriously unreliable because I’m emotionally involved.”

“You Jedi,” Bail said, sounding weary.

“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan said. “I know that it’s not easy to take in. It wasn’t for me and I was there. We thought they were extinct until one of them killed my Master.” She touched her fingers to the hilt of her lightsaber again, reassured by the cool metal. “Bail, Padmé, what I’ve told you – it can’t leave this room. It wasn’t even supposed to leave the council chamber, let alone the Temple.”

Bail shook his head. He still looked mildly stunned. “Who else knows?”

“Just a handful of other Jedi – the High Council, Anakin, Quinlan and Aayla.”

“The Supreme Chancellor?”

“That’s the Council’s decision to make,” Obi-Wan said.

“I’d forgotten that you don’t like him,” Padmé murmured.

It was true, but Obi-Wan didn’t need to hear it out loud. She glanced up as the chrono on the wall chimed the hour. “ _Fierfek_! Speaking of His Excellency, I’ve got to get to the other side of the dome in the next fifteen minutes or get taken to task for being late as well as incompetent.”

She sprang up, raking her fingers through her hair to order it. “I’m sorry to run out on you like this –”

“It’s all right,” Bail said. “You’ve certainly given us a lot to think about.”

Padmé climbed down off his desk and took a step towards Obi-Wan, close enough to push one of Obi-Wan’s braids out of her face and over her shoulder. Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow as she said, “We won’t tell, Obi-Wan. You have my word.”

“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said and on impulse, pressed a quick kiss to her friend’s cheek before she could think better of it. She felt Padmé’s rush of pleasure in the Force and backed away, a little confused by it. “Send me a message about the surveillance equipment, if you like,” she said. “Anakin will love a distraction.”

Once back in the corridors of the Senate Building, she almost had to run to make her meeting on time. Jedi or not, she was certain that the Blues would stop her if she did so, even if it hadn’t been too crowded in the building’s many corridors for that, so she contented herself by walking very quickly instead, slipping into the Chancellor’s antechamber just as the chrono chimed the quarter-hour.

Sly Moore, Palpatine’s senior administrative aide, gave her a disapproving look. “Master Kenobi,” she said. “The Supreme Chancellor has been expecting you.”

“Well, here I am,” Obi-Wan said, smoothing her hands down her robes. “May I go in?”

The Umbaran inclined her head, which Obi-Wan took as agreement. The doors to the Supreme Chancellor’s office slid open as she approached, closing silently behind her.

Palpatine was sitting at his desk, which was considerably more orderly than Bail Organa’s had been. He looked up as she entered, smiling genially. “Ah, Master Kenobi, I’m glad to see you well and in one piece.”

“That makes two of us, Your Excellency,” Obi-Wan said. “What can I do for you?”

“I thought that we might have a talk about what happened at Senator Mothma’s party,” said Palpatine. He made no invitation for her to sit, so Obi-Wan remained standing, folding her hands inside the sleeves of her robe. “I’ve already read Commander Bey’s report, of course. I admit that I’m a little confused.”

Obi-Wan remained silent, waiting patiently despite Palpatine’s raised eyebrow; he clearly expected her to respond. When she didn’t indulge him, he continued, “I’ve always considered you a remarkable woman and a quite competent Jedi, Master Kenobi. Why is it that you were unable to defend against these bounty hunters when they first appeared? Surely one Jedi Knight is more than a match for a handful of disorderly rabble.”

Anakin, Obi-Wan reminded herself, would not appreciate it if she punched his friend across the face. Nor would the High Council. “The risk to life was too great, Your Excellency,” she said. “If the bounty hunters had wanted to kill the senators, they had ample opportunity to do so earlier. If I had tried to resist, then there would have been bloodshed.”

The Supreme Chancellor was quiet for a moment, studying her face. Obi-Wan met his eyes, knowing that the strength of the Force was behind her own steady gaze. After a moment, the Supreme Chancellor glanced down, making a move to straighten a handful of flimsiplasts on his desk.

“Of course I’ll defer to your professional judgment in such matters,” he said. “Such a pity for poor Mon Mothma, though. She did work so terribly hard to make sure that bill didn’t pass, but there’s always next season. If only Master Kim had stayed behind – or you had brought young Anakin with you.” He looked up at her with mild cow-eyes.

Obi-Wan dug her nails into the soft skin of her wrist. “If only the airspeeder carrying the prisoners hadn’t crashed,” she said. “We might have been able to get some answers.”

For a millisecond, those cow-eyes narrowed to something sharper and more dangerous, a krayt dragon crouching in the sand, and then only Palpatine remained. “Yes,” he said, “an appalling tragedy. The descent corridors can be horribly dangerous. I’ll have to do something about that.”

He bent over the flimsiplasts again. Obi-Wan remained where she was, studying the view outside his floor-to-ceiling windows. “Oh, my dear girl,” said the Chancellor eventually, as if he had just remembered that he hadn’t dismissed her yet, “I’m very glad that you weren’t seriously injured. It would be very unfortunate to have young Anakin’s training interrupted by this unfortunate incident.”

“It was nothing, Your Excellency. I’m told that these things happen in politics.”

“Yes, the Senate can be quite the gundark nest, can’t it?” said Palpatine, with a soft laugh. “Well, I hope you’ll give Anakin my regards. I’m so glad that he won’t be exposed to that dreadful man after all.”

Obi-Wan blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Count Dooku,” he clarified. “He’s left the planet. Some sort of emergency back on Serenno, I’m told. I’m sure that you were looking forward to your – how did you put it, Obi-Wan? – your family reunion, but I must admit I’m glad that he won’t be able to exert any untoward interest on our boy.”

“I don’t think that it was Anakin Dooku is interested in,” Obi-Wan said without thinking, and could have bitten her tongue off for saying as much.

Palpatine’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t comment on that. “Well, run along, my dear girl. I can only hope that you’ll be around to save Senator Mothma and her friends the next time her campaigning draws untoward attention.”

“So do I, Your Excellency,” Obi-Wan said. She executed a bow of the proper depth for the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, no more and no less, and departed. Palpatine didn’t look up as she left, but Obi-Wan still felt watched, the Force shuddering and sliding along her skin and down the length of her spine.

There was a droid waiting for her in the corridor, watched suspiciously by the members of the Red Guard that served the Chancellor alone and operated independent of the Senate Guard. It was a little rabbit droid, apparently content to sit back on its heels and watch the senators who were lined up to try and speak to the Chancellor. When Obi-Wan emerged from the antechamber, it sprang up and scampered towards her.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi?” it inquired.

“That’s me,” Obi-Wan said, moving to the side of the hallway, out of the way, and crouching down so that she and the droid were at the same level. “What can I do for you, my friend?”

“I’ve brought you a message,” it said, proffering a small holoprojector. It was a different brand than the one Obi-Wan had taken from the warehouse, but like that one the serial numbers had been scraped away. The blinking light on its base showed that it had one message pre-recorded and not yet played back.

She took it with suddenly numb fingers, automatically probing at it with the Force, but it lay quiescent in her hands. Not dead, but no different than any other piece of electronics either. “Who is the message from?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know that,” said the rabbit droid. “A human male in one of the speeder bays told me to bring it to you, but he said that he’d been paid by someone else to deliver it. I wasn’t really interested.”

_Droids_ , Obi-Wan thought wearily. If she took it back to the Temple, then Anakin might be able to get more out of it, but she didn’t feel terribly sanguine on that point. “Is that all?”

“Can I go now?”

Obi-Wan sighed and nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

The droid waddled away, leaving Obi-Wan alone with the holoprojector. She contemplated it silently, then straightened up and went to go and find a private niche in which to listen. It wasn’t difficult – there were many such places in the Senate Building – and after Obi-Wan had drawn the protective curtain closed across the entrance and used the Force to shield it against being overheard she set the holoprojector down on one of the velvet-covered benches and pressed the playback button.

For a few seconds, all that Obi-Wan saw was blue static, then it steadied into a now familiar form. Obi-Wan leaned forward, shuddering as she felt the Dark Side drop around her like a cage. Her mind strained to hold her shields as they bowed outwards under the immense Force pressure.

The Sith Lord, a pale blue figure who stood twice the length of her hand in the projectioin, raised his head. His eyes were hidden beneath his hood, but beneath the shadows that covered his face Obi-Wan could make out a pale, neatly-clipped beard. _“Well done, Master Kenobi,”_ he said, his thick lips stretching into a smile. _“It’s a pity that our meeting has been delayed by the incompetence of my hirelings, but never fear, our day will come.”_

Obi-Wan pressed her hand to her mouth, as though she could conceal her dismay from the recorded figure. She felt sick, not knowing if it was the Dark Side trying to work its way into her blood or her own disgust at the words. At his next words, she bit the side of her hand so hard that she tasted blood.

_“I’ll see you soon, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”_


End file.
